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. 2017 Jul 26;7:6640. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-06794-9

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Comparison of Shape Factors Using Hyothetical MSCs. Figure 1 outlines the different features of cells that each shape factor defines. Cell length measures the “long axis” of each cell and has been used frequently in myogenic studies as cells undergoing differentiation become longer. Cell roundness is a ratio of “area” to “long axis” normalized to one. This quantitative measurement can be used to describe the rate of hypertrophy of cells with respect to both their short and long axes⁵⁵. Cells with different roundness values could plausibly have similar lengths or vice versa. Circularity describes a third biologically relevant feature as it mathematically measures the ratio of “area” to “perimeter”, normalized to one. As cells spread or begin to migrate through their surroundings, they protrude out¹³. This may or may not be captured by changes cell length or roundness but, according to our definition, can drastically decrease circularity.