Week 4: Code Chicken

               Another week of being immersed and more progress on my project has been made. Now as I implied last week, my project heavily involves coding to extract information from various data files. This week resulted in a big push and breakthrough with extracting the data from DICOM files. Now DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine, which means there can be a lot of information and data stored within these files. For my project, I am interested in the data regarding 3D renderings and after some detective work with the documentation for the DICOM standard I found a way to extract it. This allowed me to reconstruct the 3D renderings in MatLAB so that I can visualize them myself to get familiar with the anatomy. In general, what is needed to understand 3D reconstructions is how 3D images can be encoded. Recalling 3D images can be encoded by using basic shapes like triangles, quadrilaterals, hexagons, etc. this creates basic components a computer program can use to reconstruct the image. However, this is made even simpler due to the theorem that all shapes can be made through combinations of triangles. This results in only needing to know the coordinates of all the vertices of the triangles to reconstruct a 3D object, which can be found in most file types for 3D objects. This week I focused on finding this data, and using it to display the object in MatLAB.

               Besides working on my project there has been plenty of exploring this week, but not any new coffee shops to talk about. Some of the sites seen this week include Wall St., the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Empire State Building. I also had some time this weekend to go see Anastasia on Broadway, which was very well done, and I recommend seeing at some point. Now since today is the 14th that means only a few days ago was 7/11, which we all know what it means – free slushies at 7-11! However, as I found out it was also Cow Appreciation Day, which meant free food from Chick-fil-A if you dress as a cow! Back in Ithaca there is not a Chick-fil-A meaning this had to be an opportunity I had to take advantage of while in NYC even though the closest is in Time Square. Naturally, I did this as who does not like free food? So, I think getting all this free food in one day can balance out the lack of new coffee shops this past week. Hopefully next week I will have a new coffee shop to report back on in this blog.

               

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