mhart@astro.as.arizona.edu (Michael Lloyd-Hart) (12/15/90)
In Neuron Digest V6 #70 (11 Dec 1990), Ade Miller asks: > Having just completed a fairly extensive search for network applications >in astronomy and medical imaging I was surprised to find only on or two >papers in each field. Is anyone out there doing anything in either of >these fields, on any sort of hardware? The answer is yes, at least for the astronomy. There's a small group of us at the University of Arizona working hard on a neural net wavefront sensor for arrays of optical telescopes. The goal is to provide real-time correction of atmospherically-distorted optical wavefronts to minimise "seeing" and recover diffraction-limited resolution (i.e. what Hubble was supposed to do!) in the near infra-red. So far, most of the work has been done with computer simulated data (see ref.), but recently we've been working with real data collected at the Multiple Mirror Telescope and Steward Observatory's 90 inch on Kitt Peak. The implementation so far has been in C on a Sun 4 sparcstation 1+, but it won't go fast enough for real time. We'll shortly be transferring the whole thing to a transputer based system mounted in a PC for ease of portability up mountains. The U.S. Air Force Weapons Lab. in New Mexico has been working on the same problem for a single aperture telescope for some classified number of years, trying various approaches, including neural nets. They've been working closely with Thermo-Electron Technologies Corp. of San Diego, Ca, who build segmented mirrors, and train nets to run them. So far none of this work has made it out of the top secret box, but it should begin appearing in the public domain in about 6 months. Angel, J.R.P., et al., "Adaptive Optics for Array Telescopes using Neural Network Techniques", Nature, vol. 348, 221, 15 Nov 1990. Mike. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Lloyd-Hart | God forbid that any of these Steward Observatory | opinions should be those of University of Arizona | any institution! Tucson, AZ 85721 USA |
esrmm@warwick.ac.uk (Denis Anthony) (12/17/90)
In article <719@organpipe.UUCP> mhart@astro.as.arizona.edu (Michael Lloyd-Hart) writes: > >In Neuron Digest V6 #70 (11 Dec 1990), Ade Miller asks: > >> Having just completed a fairly extensive search for network applications >>in astronomy and medical imaging I was surprised to find only on or two >>papers in each field. Is anyone out there doing anything in either of >>these fields, on any sort of hardware? > Yes, I am working on medical images. Please email me if you want more info. I should like to know what anyone else is doing in this area myself. Denis