When do I use CurveAlign and when do I use CT-FIRE?
These two programs were developed with complementary but slightly different main goals. CurveAlign was developed first and had the main goal of quantifying all fiber angles within a region of interest relative to a user defined boundary be it a straight line or a tumor boundary. As our research grew in investigating the role of collagen in cancer progression and invasion we wanted to investigate how individual fiber parameters could influence cancer and other diseases. Out of this need came the development of CT-FIRE to analyze individual fiber metrics such as length, width, angle, and curvature. Besides the relative angle quantification, the newest version of CurveAlign can be used to extract other collagen fiber features, such as localized fiber density, fiber alignment, and the spatial relationship between fiber and the defined boundary. In addition, the extracted individual fibers extracted by CT-FIRE can be imported into the CurveAlign for the feature extraction mentioned above. We have future plans to integrate these programs further. For now CurveAlign should be used for bulk assessment of collagen features including angles/density and CT-FIRE for individual fiber quantification.