About

This blog serves two purposes. First, it serves as a research log for my work in the area of applying Bayesian methods to single photon emission computed tomography. Second, it serves as a homepage for the software being developed.

A good introduction to SPECT can be found at Wikipedia.

I’ve been involved in developing software to model SPECT estimate the center of spect images for the past year. The software takes the form of an R package consisting of a number of R scripts which impliment the various functionalities necessary to both simulate SPECT imagery as well as to estimate the location of the radiation source based on a dataset.

There are two overarching goals to this work. The first is to use Bayesian methods to estimate the center of SPECT images. The second is to use SPECT as a framework to test several version of the Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation in order to compare their relative costs and efficacy.

At this time software exists to generated simulated SPECT images for testing purposes and to compute estimates using the Independence Chain Metropolis Algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo.