Turning Semicircular Canal Function on Its Head: Dinosaurs and a Novel Vestibular Analysis
Figure 2
Canal midline estimation method.
(A) Multiple points, each representing the centroid of a section through the slender portion of the canal, are manually digitized. (B) A best fit plane through these points is calculated using principal components. (C) Parameters of a canny edge-finding algorithm are manually adjusted to ensure maximal automatic edge reconstruction on the best fit plane image. Any missing sections of the canal edges are reconstructed using linear interpolation for small sections and replication of the complimentary edge for larger sections. (D) An average midline path between the internal and external canal edges is calculated to represent the course of the membranous duct. The area enclosed by this average path is used as the canal size metric in this study.