CoDA: Interactive Segmentation and Morphological Analysis of Dendroid Structures Exemplified on Stony Cold-Water Corals

Abstract: Herein, we present CoDA, the Coral Dendroid structure Analyzer, a visual analytics suite that allows for the first time to investigate the ontogenetic morphological development of complex dendroid coral colonies, exemplified on three important framework-forming dendroid cold-water corals: Lophelia pertusa (Linnaeus, 1758), Madrepora oculata (Linnaeus, 1758), and Goniocorella dumosa (Alcock, 1902). Input to CoDA is an initial instance segmentation of the coral polyp cavities (calices), from which it estimates the skeleton tree of the colony and extracts classical morphological measurements and advanced shape features of the individual corallites. CoDA also works as a proofreading and error correction tool by helping to identify wrong parts in the skeleton tree and providing tools to quickly correct these errors. The final skeleton tree enables the derivation of additional information about the calices/corallite instances that otherwise could not be obtained, including their ontogenetic generation and branching patterns - the basis of a fully quantitative statistical analysis of the coral colony morphology. Part of CoDA is CoDAGraph, a feature-rich link-and-brush user interface for visualizing the extracted features and 2D graph layouts of the skeleton tree, enabling the real-time exploration of complex coral colonies and their building blocks, the individual corallites and branches. In the future, we expect CoDA to greatly facilitate the analysis of large stony corals of different species and morphotypes, as well as other dendroid structures, enabling new insights into the influence of genetic and environmental factors on their ontogenetic morphological development.