“…An important goal in medical imaging is to assess the morphology of anatomical structures for the purposes of disease detection or monitoring. While most research focuses on 3D shape analysis in this setting (Kurtek et al, ; Samir, Kurtek, Srivastava, & Canis, ), curve‐based approaches have been used to model shapes of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging fiber tracts (Kurtek, Srivastava, Klassen, & Ding, ), to assess variability in manual segmentation of medical images (Kurtek et al, ), and to model survival based on glioblastoma multiforme tumor shapes (Bharath, Kurtek, Rao, & Baladandayuthapani, ). Other popular applications of statistical shape analysis include biometrics (Kaziska & Srivastava, ; Samir, Srivastava, Daoudi, & Klassen, ; Srivastava, Samir, Joshi, & Daoudi, ), military (Joshi & Srivastava, ), activity recognition and modeling (Su, Kurtek, Klassen, & Srivastava, ), and anthropology (O'Higgins & Dryden, ), among others.…”