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I have just about made it through the first week of the program.  It started with safety training on Monday morning and continued into the afternoon with various tours of the buildings and labs.  I attend UD during the school year so I had seen all of the buildings and most of the labs we walked through but it was still good to take a look at the labs as a work place for the summer instead of a classroom setting. 

Tuesday we began with a quick evaluation of the program and then broke up into pairs and met with the professors we will be working with throughout the summer.  Allan and I are working with Professors Buma and Barner this summer from the Electrical Engineering Department at UD.  They explained what they had in mind for our project this summer and gave us a brief gameplan for how we will go about this.  Basically, what we will be working towards this summer is a combination of optofluidic microscopes and tomography.  After speaking with the professors we were sent on our way to do some research on our own and gain a background knowledge of these topics as well as digital image processing (which seems like a prominent part of the project as well). 

The rest of the week, including today, as been background reading and research to prepare ourselves for the actual work on our project.  Through my readings I have found that tomography is basically combining multiple images of an object into a 3D model of the object. Also I found that optofluidic microscopes involve very small ‘targets’ flowing through a channel which has tiny holes in the bottom through which images are captured and then complied together to create an image of the target.  So it sounds like we are trying to develop something like  an optofluidic microscope that will produce 3D images or models instead of just a 2D image.

I have also been working with MATLAB and figuring out digital image processing tools and techniques.  Although I do have a little knowledge of MATLAB, I do not know anything about image processing so I have been practicing with tutorials and my own experimenting.  We have gotten help from some of the Grad students here and in my opinion I definitely have a better grasp of image processing as well as a general understanding of optofluidic microscopes and tomography.

I think the next step in the process is to take a look  at a prototype developed by one of the professors and then making a computer program involving tomosynthesis-based image reconstruction.  Hopefully next week we will have a little more hands on work to do and get this project underway!

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