Data and Code Availability

Source code

The complete pipeline – mesh extraction, descriptor computation, surface registration, statistical shape modelling, association analyses, and figure generation – is open source:

https://github.com/AnatolAicher/NAKO-Ribcage-SSM

The repository README documents the environment, the preset-driven pipeline driver (scripts/run_pipeline.py), and the run-directory layout; the Scalismo registration stage lives under environment/scalismo_ssm/.

Canonical run

Figures and numbers on this site were rendered from pipeline run full_analysis-ab26a74 (2026-08-09 22:55 UTC), code revision ab26a74.

Runs are configured by a YAML preset. The template for the full-cohort analysis is presets/full_analysis.example.yaml; presets/example.yaml documents every key.

Shape-model release

The mean shape, the principal-component modes, and the demographics-to-shape generator (Methods §2.8.6) are released as a 6 MB bundle with a NumPy-only loader in the model/ directory of the code repository and archived on Zenodo under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22230693. The SSM Viewer embeds the same model.

Participant-level data

Due to data privacy regulations in the context of the NAKO cohort, the individual-level metadata and imaging data used in this project cannot be released publicly. NAKO data can be obtained via the electronic application portal at https://www.nako.de/transferhub. Specific derived data may be available on request from the corresponding author (), subject to NAKO data access policies.