Problem 1: How do I tell the computer to recognize cranial blood vessels? What are the useful parameters worth measuring?

Problem 2: How do I reverse-engineer something like this and build it for 1/10 the cost?

What I learned:​

First time using MATLAB!

Research is exciting and cutting-edge; there's a lot of freedom in choosing what to study

I fell in love with the way everything could be built so rapidly. Testing out one-off weird ideas became possible. Image stacks were pre-processed in ImageJ and MATLAB. I had never seriously programmed before, so I think MATLAB was the perfect intro for me. I got to play with real data collected right before me, and visualize them by creating buggy plots!

The flexibility of research allowed me to be very creative. My professor asked me what I thought were the most useful parameters to track and measure. I'd have to skim the current papers on what people measure today, and decide if they were worth studying. For example, in context of a micro-stroke, does tortuosity (how bendy the vessels are) or radius of the vessel matter more? How would I measure tortuosity in our lab's data sets? How would I display the data?

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Optics 101

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I gained a newfound appreciation for the mechanism and science behind acquiring a microscopy image. There are so many components from the laser to the chemistry of fluorophores to the software!

Custom-built two-photon microscope and laser speckle contrast imaging system with time-correlated single photon counting capabilities. (Kazmi, et al., 2013)

How to

How to

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