I would like to thank my senior supervisor, Dr. Stella Atkins, for her exceptional enthusiasm and guidance, and for providing a great environment in which to do research. I would also like to thank Dr. Brian Funt for offering his image processing and computer vision expertise, Dr. Alex MacKay for adding MRI experience to my examining committee, and Dr. Arvind Gupta for taking the time to chair the examining committee. Special thanks to my research associates, Mark Anderson, Micheline Kamber, and Brian Johnston, for their invaluable input and discussions.
I am grateful to Don Paty, Andrew Riddehough, Keith Cover, Brenda Rhodes, and Torre Zuk of the University of British Columbia MS/MRI Study Group for supplying the MRI data used in this research. I am also indebted to Terry Arden and Joseph Poon of Logical Vision Ltd. for donating WiT, the visual programming environment used to implement my research software.
This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, by MacDonald Dettwiler Ltd., and by Simon Fraser University.