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Within the context of this investigation, no statistical analysis is expected to be required (nor pragmatic) because of the small number of subjects, possibly just one, initially. It is hoped, however, that by looking at several different instances acquired at the same site there will be room for studying the variation in shape of a preselected region and thus a characteristic type of expansion, shearing, tapering, or a more complex combination of factors which strain analysis can account for. Initial code has been written to deal with the raw data itself, yet it remains to be determined which method to use for 3-D segmentation and which calculations to perform on the segmented data. The aim is to decide on measures which are meaningful and distinguishable. Implementation of a prototype is expected to be a trivial task in MATLAB and GNU Octave. Some peripheral tools are written in C and automation coded in Bash (e.g. for data conversions).
