What is use of orientation in Cell morphology analysis?

Greetings Users.

I am a biology major trying to understand cell's (as in animal/human cells) morphology using matlab. I found the orientation feature on region props and wanted to know what it represents. The definition is just an angle between a base line and the major axis. Is there a way to theoretically explain how the orientation corresponds to how the object (the cells) is aligned in the plane.

For example: I have a numerical value of a single object as 48.51447079 for the feature "orientation". What does it mean ?

Answer 1

[Rajani Mishra]

Orientation property of regionprops function returns an angle between the x-axis and the major axis of the ellipse that has the same second-moments as the region. I came across few related questions :-

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/376955-what-is-difference-between-orientation-of-regionprops-and-principal-component-coefficients-of-pc

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/91053-how-does-this-function-regionprops-to-find-the-orientation-of-any-object

Hope that helps!