The traditional approach in studying the morphological development of the retinal ganglion cells includes a static depiction of the known biochemical pathway. We are interested in applying the concepts of a coherence network to known biochemical pathways in hopes of identifying previously unidentified biochemical participants. A coherence network is created where molecules and proteins in said biochemical pathways are represented by nodes and the relationships between them are evaluated through arcs. This will be used to simulate the morphological development of the retinal ganglion cells and help pinpoint the key molecules that are involved.
Advisor: Dr. Li
Matching 3D images remains a challenging problem. Most search engines on the internet use textual description to match images. More sophisticated systems use shape descriptors that are automatically constructed from the original 3D shape. Good shape descriptors must be insensitive to noise, orientation, scale, or translation. They must be fast to compute, small in size, and easy to compare. In this research, we are proposing a novel method for creating 3D shape descriptors. It is inspired from the descriptors using 3D spherical harmonics. 3D spherical harmonics present the benefits of being insensitive to noise, orientation, scale, and translation, and of being relatively fast to compute. On the other hand, they have the disadvantage of requiring 3D storage. We address this problem by using 4D hyperspherical harmonics. A 3D object is mapped to the 4D unit hypersphere. The 4D hyperspherical harmonics have the same advantage of the 3D harmonics and the added benefit that they only require two-dimensional storage as a vector.