After a weekend at the beach its back to work and back to MATLAB. In the NISE program there are not only undergraduate researchers but also high school teachers that come in and work on the projects with us. After being introduced to everyone last week we had a big meeting and discussed what is going on and who is doing what. For the most part the high school teachers working on our project are doing background research (similar to what we did) on optofluidics, tomosynthesis and microscopy/optics for now. They will be focusing more on the hardware aspect of the project while Allan and I continue with MATLAB. I hope we get to do some of the prototypes of the microscopes too because that is more of what I am interested in but its understandable that we are responsible for the software part seeing as MATLAB is too hard to pick up in a few weeks for the teachers.
Allan and I have been working on essentially the same code as before however our focus has shifted slightly this time. Instead of generating the images and seeing how well we can use tomosynthesis to put them back together we are trying to figure out how many frames or images of the actual object should we be taking to use in our program. First, I changed the code a little bit to have an input of the number of frames I wanted. The program would produce that number of frames, use tomosynthesis to combine the images and display the image of what the object really looks like. Then, I also made the program display two graphs. In digital imaging each image is a matrix of numbers that correspond to what color that pixel should be in the image. In this case 1 corresponds to a white pixel and 0 corresponds to a black pixel and grays are in between. I chose the middle, horizantal line of pixels (the line that goes through the middle of the spheres) to graph so I can see how accurately the circles are being produced by the tomosynthesis actually are.
Below is a sample image of the two graphs produced when we take 20 frames of the two spheres (same as the previous post); the top graphtakes the middle line of pixels from the tomosynthesis slice where the larger circle is located (z=4.0) and the bottom graph is of the z-value where the smaller circle is located (z=6.0). As you can see in both graphs there are two dips in the line which signifies the darker pixels of each of the two circles (the darkest pixels are in the middle).
The next step of my process includes quantifying these graphs so I can see how the different number of frames effects the tomosynthesis accuracy. I took the approach that the darker the middle pixel in each circle on the respective graph the more accurate the tomosynthesis recreation is. So I collected data and found the intensity of the middle pixel for each circle and compared that to the number of frames that produced that image. I then graphed the value of the darkest pixel with the number of frames. As you can see as the number of frames increase the intensity of the pixel decrease (or gets darker) and therefore is more accurate. However, it does seem to level out as the number of frames increase.
From this work I have concluded that is is probably best to use someplace between 10 and 50 frames, more specifically around 20-25. This way there is still accuracy but is not an excessive amount of frames are needed. Allan is working on the same thing but with a completely different approach so hopefully his program will yield similar numbers and we can settle on a number to use in the future.
