Traditional and Modern Morphometrics: Review

Morphometrics, a branch of morphology, is the study of the size and shape components of biological forms and their variation in the population. In biological and medical sciences, there is a long history of attempts to quantitatively express the diversity of the size and shape of biological forms. On the basis of historical developments in morphometry, we address several questions related to the shape of organs or organisms that are considered in biological and medical studies. In the field of morphometrics, multivariate statistical analysis is used to rigorously address such questions. Historically, these methods have involved the analysis of collections of distances or angles, but recent theoretical, computational, and other advances have shifted the focus of morphometric procedures to the Cartesian coordinates of anatomical points. In recent years, in biology and medicine, the traditional morphometric studies that aim to analyze shape variation have been replaced by modern morphometric studies. In the biological and medical sciences, morphometric methods are frequently preferred for examining the morphologic structures of organs or organisms with regard to diseases or environmental factors. These methods are also preferred for evaluating and classifying the variation of organs or organisms with respect to growth or allometry time dependently. Geometric morphometric methods are more valid than traditional morphometric methods in protecting more morphological information and in permitting analysis of this information.