Now published: pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

We are excited to share that our software paper is now published:

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Khurana Y, Ishihara K

Bioinformatics Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1093/bioadv/vbag273

pykarambola is a Python package that brings Minkowski tensor analysis to 3D biological shape quantification. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous, tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, making them well-suited for characterizing the complex shapes of organoids and other biological structures.

The package accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats, integrating directly with segmentation outputs from standard bioimage analysis workflows. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland samples, pykarambola reproduces results from the original C++ implementation with high precision while achieving a 2.8x speedup, thanks to a Cython extension for performance-critical computations.