I/O schemes and optimization

To understand the I/O routines, we briefly review the data storage schema used in PARA-BMU.

Data is stored in a dynamically allocated array of type BYTE, a user defined type in C++ which is 8 bits in length and unsigned. Each array element represents a voxel, and its value the Hounsfield value of that region of the physical system (essentially a density value derived by CT scanning a physical bone sample). The data is organised as a 3D array with dimensions corresponding to cartesian co-ordinates. The solver itself operates on slices of data corresponding to z-planes in the system. The data contains many elements which have a value of 0 indicating that no material is present (i.e. empty space).

We now proceed to describe the current and new I/O routines in PARA-BMU.


Subsections