BIRS Workshop — Mathematical Methods for Exploring and Analyzing Morphological Shapes across Biological Scales

The advances in imaging techniques have enabled the access to 3D shapes present in a variety of biological structures: organs, cells, organelles, and proteins. Since biological shapes are related to physiological functions, biomedical analyses are poised to incorporate more morphological data. For example, at the macroscopic scale, characterizing brain morphologies allows clinicians to quantify the progression of Alzheimer's disease. At the microscopic scale, the characterization of protein morphologies allows biologists to understand how these biomolecules react to chemical variations of their environment and helps detect promising pharmacological targets for the treatment of conditions ranging from neurological disorders to several cancers. Therefore, different biological scales ask a common statistical question: how can we build mathematical and statistical descriptions of biological morphologies and their variations? This workshop invites participants from different application fields to exchange mathematical and statistical methods for the study of biological shapes.