Graduation date: 2007
Oftentimes in visualization, the goal of using volume datasets is not just to visualize them but also to analyze and compare them. In order to compare the two volumes, we cannot take all the voxels into consideration. The size of a typical volume data set is quite large (maybe a billion or more voxels), thus it is not feasible to compare all these voxels to all in the other volume set. This project uses optimization methods to find the best orientation for aligning a second volume data set with a first. Using these methods, we will be able to determine how well one medical data volume matches against a "normally-developed" volume of the same type.