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.

翻译：本文提出CoDA（珊瑚树状结构分析器），这是一套可视化分析工具集，首次实现了对复杂树状珊瑚群体个体发育形态演化的研究。该系统以三种重要的造架型树状冷水珊瑚为例进行展示：Lophelia pertusa (Linnaeus, 1758)、Madrepora oculata (Linnaeus, 1758) 和 Goniocorella dumosa (Alcock, 1902)。CoDA的输入是珊瑚虫腔室（萼部）的初始实例分割结果，系统据此估算群体骨骼树，并提取单个珊瑚个体的经典形态测量参数与高级形状特征。CoDA同时可作为校对与纠错工具，帮助识别骨骼树中的错误部分，并提供快速修正这些错误的工具。最终生成的骨骼树能够推导出关于萼部/珊瑚个体实例的额外信息，包括其个体发育世代与分枝模式——这些是实现珊瑚群体形态完全定量统计分析的基础。CoDA包含CoDAGraph模块，这是一个功能丰富的联动刷选式用户界面，用于可视化提取的特征及骨骼树的二维图布局，支持对复杂珊瑚群体及其构成单元（单个珊瑚个体与分枝）进行实时探索。未来，我们预期CoDA将极大促进不同物种与形态型的大型石珊瑚以及其他树状结构的分析工作，为揭示遗传与环境因素对其个体发育形态演化的影响提供新的见解。