How the division plane is positioned during plant cell division plays an important role in the building of specific tissue architectures and organ shapes. Much is known about the molecular and cellular machinery involved in the different steps of cell division but how the positioning and orientation of the division plane is selected remains unclear. Several phenomenological rules have been proposed to relate the geometry of the mother cell to the selection of the division plane. Among these, Errera’s rule is generally accepted as a default principle, according to which cells divide into two daughter cells of equal volumes with a minimum contact interface area. Deviations from this default regime would result from specific signals such as hormonal and mechanical cues. However, much of this view has been derived essentially from 2D analyses of volume-symmetric divisions. Recently, we introduced an original image-based 3D model of cell division that allows to address both symmetric and asymmetric partitionings of the mother cell space. Using this model, we showed that a single rule linking the positioning of the division plane to cell geometry accounted for both stereotyped and variable, symmetric and asymmetric, division patterns in A. thaliana early embryo, thus unifying a range of distinct division patterns. Here, we examined the potential of this approach to decipher division patterns in the shoot apical meristem. A large collection of 3D time-lapse images of developing meristems with fluorescently labeled cell membranes were acquired using confocal microscopy. We designed original image processing pipelines under the BIP software (see companion poster by Biot et al.) to quantify topological, morphological, and geometrical features of tissues, cells and cell divisions. The 3D cell division model was run in mother cells from automatically identified cell divisions and model predictions were compared to observed daughter cell patterns. We report the first results of the quantitative image analyses and model simulations we obtained on meristems from wild-type and from trm678 mutant plants in which the absence of preprophase band alters division patterns.