Fall 2005 Capstone Projects

Our Lady of the Lake P.E.T. Imaging Center ROC Project

ROC is a common tool for evaluating an imaging system. The objective of this project is to set up and to conduct an ROC study on PET/CT images: the new method of presenting a CT image, LSU-Unified image, should be compared to the conventional Gold-Standard image.

Brachial Artery Dilation Analysis

This particular project is a joint effort with members of the Louisiana State University Department of Kinesiology and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center to produce a program to generate new ways to quantify the healthiness of a person by analyzing heart-related data.

Williams Olefins Project

The main objective of this project is to study and refine an existing computer program that was made available to us by Williams Company in Geismar. The computer program is designed to predict the product yield rates and the energy required for the whole process, and it also computes the net profit for the plant.

The current model is directly derived from experimental data by the method of curve fitting (regression type model). However, the predicted outputs from the computer program do not match the actual data for the energy input. Our goal is then to investigate the existing model and find out what causes the program to perform so poorly in predicting the heat input.