Hi dear creators of QCPA
Thank you for building up such a comprehensive tool for quantifying and analyzing animal color patterns.
I have encountered a small question when I use this toolbox for analyzing my data. When I looked at the outputs from particle analysis (the first summary table, which shows metrics for each cluster but not for the individual patches making up the cluster), I got difficulties in understanding those metrics. Although tried to search in the published paper, supplementary document and the user manual, I failed to find out how those metrics were defined and/or calculated. Would you mind kindly provide some references regarding how they were defined and calculated, so that I can reach a better understanding on those parameters hence facilitating my further analysis?
I really appreciate your help.
Good question, an apologies for not making these outputs more clear.
The summary table is the same as running “Particle analysis” in ImageJ. i.e. we’re just applying the standard ImageJ function, where each colour cluster is treated as a selection. So this will be the averages taken from the detailed particle description table. e.g. colour cluster “1” might be made up of three separate regions in the image. In the summary table the average statistics (size, shape etc..) are shown, and in the detailed table you can see the values for each individual particle (three rows in this case).
I hope that helps!
Jolyon