My Senior Project will be to work with Dr. Younis on his Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) research project. My job will be to help by analyzing pictures of medical images to determine the different diffusion rates among different specimens.
One of the problems we wish to solve is how to be able to ignore the orientation
of a specimen when trying to calculate the coefficient of diffusion at a particular point.
To calculate the coefficient, we must take into account 6 different vectors: 3 are the
diagonal elements, Dxx, Dyy, Dzz, and the other 3 are the components of the diagonal elements, Dxy, Dxz, Dyz.
After calculating these values we can construct the coefficient using these values to determine the rate of diffusion and
the direction of diffusion through the specimen. The following is an example of the 6 vectors.
A practical approach of this project is to better help doctors and researchers analyze the structures of spines, brains, and other matter in a more automated process. Now, they must manually look at the specimens to determine the composition of it. With DTI, they will now be able to take pictures of these specimens and run them through this new process to see what the compistion is.
This project will involve analyzing medical images to found out their composition. I will be using some software that has already been developed to achieve some of the parts of the project. Other parts of the project will involve me programming the algorithms that are needed to accomplish this project. The language will most probably be in Java.
At this point, I am still learning more and more on the subject of DTI, and the necessary information to complete this project. And there
will also be things that come up, so there will be more to this project, than just this initial proposal.