Using the Tiler

The Tiler panel contains all of the functionality necessary to generate surfaces from blocks of data. The reader would do well to read the help documents on the Tiler and related procedures. The help documents can be read with a web browser by selecting Help:Help... from the Tiler's menu. The ITG website has the Analyze help pages for browsing without having to run Analyze.

The Tiler interface panel initially displays an empty window made up of two equal panes: on the left the blue, data-slice side and on the right, the black, render side. The left side of the panel can display slices of the dataset for individual inspection. Look for the final surface to appear in the render panel on the right after extraction.

Playing with the Generate:Slice... and View:Intensities... menu options provides opportunities to view pieces of the data under various thresholding conditions. These two panels are indispensible if the data has not previously been thresholded or run through one of the segmentation tools. Use them to isolate the structures of interest.

Generating a surface using the Tiler proceeds through three stages:

selecting suitable thresholds that define the surface;
selecting a suitable algorithm for generating the surface; and,
setting the surface generation parameters (if applicable).

Some of these steps may need to be repeated multiple times in order to refine the surface. Specification of the parameters used during the building process takes place through the Generate:Parameters... control panel, described in the next section.

Do it yourself...
1.	Select Process:Modeling:Tiler... from the main workspace menu. This should open an "empty" Tiler window.
2.	Observe the two halves of the interface: the blue slice pane on the left and the black render pane on the right.
3.	(Optional) Launch the Generate:Slice... control panel and select some slices to view in the slice pane.
4.	(Optional) Also launch the View:Intensities... control panel and adjust the intensity slider bars. Try switching the Type pop-up menu from Window to Threshold to see the selected slice with the data thresholded.
5.	(Optional) Observe how these two control panels affect the blue data-slice pane on the Tiler interface panel.
6.	Select Generate:Parameters... from the Tiler menu to prepare for the surface extraction process.

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