Quantifying topological features and irregularities in zebrafish patterns using the sweeping-plane filtration

Abstract: Complex patterns emerge across a wide range of biological systems. While such patterns often exhibit remarkable robustness, variation and irregularity exist at multiple scales and can carry important information about the underlying agent interactions driving collective dynamics. Many methods for quantifying biological patterns focus on large-scale, characteristic features (such as stripe width or spot number), but questions remain on how to characterize messy patterns. In the case of cellular patterns that emerge during development or regeneration, understanding where patterns are most susceptible to variability may help shed light on cell behavior and the tissue environment. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce methods based on topological data analysis to classify and quantify messy patterns arising from agent-based interactions, by extracting meaningful biological interpretations from persistence barcode summaries. To compute persistent homology, our methods rely on a sweeping-plane filtration which, in comparison to the Vietoris--Rips filtration, is more rarely applied to biological systems. We demonstrate how results from the sweeping-plane filtration can be interpreted to quantify stripe patterns (with and without interruptions) by analyzing in silico zebrafish skin patterns, and we generate new quantitative predictions about which pattern features may be most robust or variable. Our work provides an automated framework for quantifying features and irregularities in spot and stripe patterns and highlights how different approaches to persistent homology can provide complementary insight into biological systems.