Multimodal frequency distribution analysis of peripheral nerves.
In morphometric studies of peripheral nerves, the statistical analysis of such data as axon diameters is complicated by the presence of multimodal distributions. Nerve fiber diameters, for example, cannot be analyzed by classical parametric tests, and such descriptive statistics as mean or variance lose much of their usefulness. The recent development of stochastic catastrophe models offers a new parametric tool with which to describe multimodal distributions. This paper describes our development of a PASCAL computer program that permitted the modelling, comparison and segmentation of multimodal distributions. The method is based on a description of the multimodal frequency distributions by probability density functions of the canonical exponential family.
D001369:Axons / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D006801:Humans; D007866:Leg / Q000294:innervation; D008838:Microcomputers; D008854:Microscopy, Electron; D008954:Models, Biological; D010525:Peripheral Nerves / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D012984:Software; D013269:Stochastic Processes