Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structu

re of organisms and their specific structural features.[1]

This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, patte
rn,size), i.e., external morphology (eidonomy) as well as the form and structure
of the internal parts like bones and organs, i.e., internal morphology or anato
my. This is in contrast to physiology, which deals primarily with function. Morp
hology is a branch of life science dealing with the study of gross structure of
an organism or taxon and its component parts.
Contents [hide]
1
Etymology and term usage
2
Branches of morphology
3
Morphology and classification
4
3D cell morphology:classification
5
See also
6
References
Etymology and term usage[edit]
The word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek ??f?, morph, meaning "form", and ?
????, lgos, meaning "word, study, research". The biological concept of morphology
was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the Ger
man anatomist and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800).
In English-speaking countries, the term "molecular morphology" has been used for
some time for describing the structure of compound molecules, such as polymers
[2] and RNA. The term "gross morphology" refers to the collective structures or
an organism as a whole as a general description of the form and structure of an
organism, taking into account all of its structures without specifying an indivi
dual structure.
Branches of morphology[edit]
Comparative Morphology is analysis of the patterns of the locus of structures wi
thin the body plan of an organism, and forms the basis of taxonomical categoriza
tion.
Functional Morphology is the study of the relationship between the structure and
function of morphological features.
Experimental Morphology is the study of the effects of external factors upon the
morphology of organisms under experimental conditions, such as the effect of ge
netic mutation.
"Anatomy" is a "branch of morphology that deals with the structure of organisms"
.[3]
Morphology and classification[edit]
Most taxa differ morphologically from other taxa. Typically, closely related tax
a differ much less than more distantly related ones, but there are exceptions to
this. Cryptic species are species which look very similar, or perhaps even outw
ardly identical, but are reproductively isolated. Conversely, sometimes unrelate
d taxa acquire a similar appearance as a result of convergent evolution or even
mimicry. In addition, there can be morphological differences within a species, s
uch as in Apoica flavissima where queens are significantly smaller than workers.
A further problem with relying on morphological data is that what may appear, m
orphologically speaking, to be two distinct species, may in fact be shown by DNA
analysis to be a single species. The significance of these differences can be e
xamined through the use of allometric engineering in which one or both species a
re manipulated to phenocopy the other species.

3D cell morphology:classification[edit]
Invention and development of microscopy enable the observation of 3-D cell morph
ology with both high spatial and temporal resolution. The dynamic processes of t

hese cell morphology which is controlled a complex system played an important ro

le in varied important biological process, such as immune and invasive responses
[4]. In order to extract these information, the data processing work is numerous
, since we need to systematically and quantitatively analyze the 3-D cell morpho
logy, which is challenging for multi-signal processing. Existing computational i
maging methods are rather limited in analyzing and tracking such time-lapse data
sets, and manual analysis is unreasonably time-consuming and subject to observer
variances. One of these challenges is how to do classify different cells after
simplified representations of the raw data from 3-D signals by using shape extra
ction and description, since we need to know the relationship between the number
patterns and the function which the multidimensional signal represents. Machine
learning algorithm super fit these category since it will build a model which d
escribe the properties of a given population of individuals, which will be final
ly able to characterize subgroups of individuals with similar properties, or to
predict the properties of a new unknown (or simulated) individual[5]. We are goi
ng to discuss the supervised machine-learning techniques for processing the 3-D
signals, which requires that a subset of the data in each subpopulations be manu
ally annotated to classify the rest of the data set. There are basically three m
ain approaches. 1.K-nearest Neighbors methods. Basic principle of it is shown in
figure. Suppose we have an pattern which locates at (x1,y1, z1), if Nk(x1, y1,
z1) stands for the k nearest neighborhood samples, which defined by some metric,
e.g., Euclidean distance or Hamming distance, then the decision rule to classif
y this pattern is defined by a majority vote on {Pi | (xi,yi,zi) ?Nk(x,y,z) }. S
pecifically, in identification of cancer cell at different phase along the time,
k=6 and a set of 35 subset features can generate best results. Also, certain co
nstrains need to be applied in order to compensate the phase identification erro
rs: a) The go-forward rule: Cell cycle progress can only go forward in the biolo
gically cell phase sequence; b) The continuation rule: Cell cycle progress canno
t skip a cell phase and enter the phase after; c) The phase-timing rule: The tim
e period that a cell stays in a phase cannot be changed dramatically. Results of
the k-nearest neighbors shows good accuracy. The k-nearest neighbor s method is e
asy to realize and the cost of learning process is zero. However, when the cell
type distribution is seriously skewed, this method is not suitable, since the we
ight will lean to the more distributed type instead of fairly treated each type.
Also, this method will cost a lot of time when the dataset is very large. 2.Dec
ision Trees. The decision tree adds candidate node for splitting by defining hal
f planes P1 = {x | xj = s} and P2 = {x | xj = s}, in which xj is the splitting v
ariable and s is the splitting point. At each candidate node, compute the impuri
ty, e.g., the Gini index I = p-1 (1 - p-1) + p+1 (1 - p+1), in which pk is the f
raction of class k observed at that node. The splitting nodes are selected to im
prove the homogeneity sequentially, and the decision at each leaf node is by maj
ority vote[6]. This method is used to determine the relationship between gene ex
pressions and image traits, and helps to find the modules of coregulated genes[7
]. First, the gene expression of the image traits are obtained. Then the regress
ion tree of the gene expression array is built by the decision nodes and leaf no
des. Each decision nodes contain two child nodes: upregulated or not. Thus, for
a certain given array, we could find sets of arrays: those find the way down to
the corresponding leaf. These response can be modeled as a normal distribution o
f the expression values of the module s genes, and this distribution is encoded us
ing a mean and variance stored at the corresponding leaf. Since the assumption i
s that the gene in each response set are tightlt coregulated, thus there will be
small change for the distribution of gene in each response set, vice versa. Thu
s by applying iterative algorithm, we could find the best results, which have th
e smallest number of modules of genes that could be coregulated. The decision tr
ee method could provide an efficient way for classification. However, this metho
d is sometime unstable when perturbation is added, which mean unavailable for cl
assification with high noise level. 3.Support Vector Machine(SVM). SVM method in
principle is to find a hyperplane which is in higher or infinite dimensional sp
ace. The assumption is that the sets which are not linearly seperable may be map
ped into a higher-dimensional space, which may make the separation easier. Thus

the basic thing is how to find the hyperplane which satisify the condition which
makes the largest separation of data. The SVM method is used to do the time-res
olved phenotype annotation. They first use water shedsplit-and-merge to segment
each cell. Then they use these segmentation, and the radial-based kernel and pro
bability estimates to build the hyperplane and train these vector. By using thes
e training vectors, they could predict the annotation of the cell, which corresp
onds with the human results very well. The advantages of this method is that it
is very efficient and the design of the kernel provide volatility of this method
. However, this kind of kernel fitting will be very sensitive to over fitting th
e model selection criterion[8].