Thesis I wrote to graduate as Master in Physics

---

My thesis was about the analysis of passive polymere detectors, (in fact special pieces of plastic), that produce tiny cones after etching at the positions where heavy, high energetic particles (He-nuclei and heavier ions) have penetrated the detector de detector.

For the first time, confocal microscopy was used to analyse the etching cones in three dimensions, from which it was possible to characterize the particles much better.

Before analysis, the images were preprocessed with the Huygens image restoration software to compensate for the image degradation from the imaging process. It was my task to figure out how to use this software optimally for our goal.

For the analysis of the recorded images of the ecthed tracks (for high energetic particles, these are cone-shaped), a cone fitting algorithm was derived based on an ellipse fitting algorithm in the different 2D slices of a 3D stack of images.

Thesis presentation (pdf)

Some results

• Track recordings and simultaneous recordings of beads
• Comparison of some algorithms, applied on tracks (13/03/1999)
• Practical recipe to perform deconvolutions with Huygens (in Dutch)