Current status of Modan

As of today, Aug 4th 2009, Modan is still in its early stage. It has been almost one and a half year since I first started this project, but I couldn't spend much time on it. Recently I could spare some time, and thought it would be better if I could make Modan available for public before the summer break ends. Still, I'm far away from presenting this as a ready-to-use software product. That said, Modan can do quite a few things now.

1. Data acquisition - you can digitize 2D landmark data from image file. For easy digitizing, you can adjust brightness/contrast, zoom and pan the image. Wireframe and baseline definition can be done at the same time. Also, calibration is possible so that you can put a scale when you take the picture of a specimen, and calibrate the coordinates accordingly. You can input the coordinates manually. If you already have digitized data in MS Excel files or .tps files, you can import those files.
2. Data transformation - Once the data are acquired, you may want to export them in different format for use with IMP or SPSS, R, or whatever. In export dialog, you can choose among formats to be exported. Data will be transfromed on the fly when actual export is being done. Users can select which superimposition method they want to use when exporting, among Procrustes superimposition (generalized least-square), Bookstein registration, sliding baseline registration, and experimental RFTRA. Bookstein and sliding baseline require baseline to be defined. If you want traditional lengths, you have to define a wireframe for the dataset beforehand.
3. Analysis - At the moment, only principal component analysis is implemented. Transformation (or, superimposition) is 'transparent' to the user. You just select the superimposition method with radio buttons. and the choice is instantly reflected in the viewer control as well as PCA result plot.

There's no documentation yet. I hope I can write one, such as 'getting started guide,' soon. But right now, I'm more focusing on adding features, fixing bugs, cleaning up the user interface, and so on.

You can download Modan version 0.1.4 from Google code website, even though I cannot guarantee anything about this version. http://code.google.com/p/modan Right now, I only provide installable file for MS Windows. Other platforms will be supported in the future. I'm developing Modan in Python language, with wxPython toolkit. So, basically it's multi-platform, but there's some dependency on MS Windows specific module now. If you are interested, you can check out the source code anytime.

What's my plan now? You can get some idea from the ToDoList wiki page - http://code.google.com/p/modan/wiki/ToDoList . In fact, every time I run Modan to test it, there comes out at least two or three things to be done before I can let anyone other than me actually use it. (probably I'd better not test it?) At least, I want to do following things before I "officially" release Modan to public. Implementing canonical variate analysis, 3D visualization of analysis results, and some heavy UI clean-up (fingers crossed).

Well, I know nobody is reading this blog at the moment. So I don't worry much about anything. :D