printing, especially Fused Deposition Modeling, can introduce anisotropy into printed parts. This is due to the fact that FDM is designed to extrude and print layers of thermoplastic materials. This creates materials that are strong when tensile stress is applied in parallel to the layers and weak when the material is perpendicular to the layers. Microfabrication Anisotropic etching techniques (such as deep reactive-ion etching) are used in microfabrication processes to create well defined microscopic features with a high aspect ratio. These features are commonly used in MEMS and microfluidic devices, where the anisotropy of the features is needed to impart desired optical, electrical, or physical properties to the device. Anisotropic etching can also refer to certain chemical etchants used to etch a certain material preferentially over certain crystallographic planes (e.g., KOH etching of silicon [100] produces pyramid-like structures) Neuroscience Diffusion tensor imaging is an MRI technique that involves measuring the fractional anisotropy of the random motion (Brownian motion) of water molecules in the brain. Water molecules located in fiber tracts are more likely to be anisotropic, since they are restricted in their movement (they move more in the dimension parallel to the fiber tract rather than in the two dimensions orthogonal to it), whereas water molecules dispersed in the rest of the brain have less restricted movement and therefore display more isotropy. This difference in fractional anisotropy is exploited to create a map of the fiber tracts in the brains of the individual. Remote sensing and radiative transfer modeling Radiance fields (see Bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF)) from a reflective surface are often not isotropic in nature. This makes calculations of the total energy being reflected from any scene a difficult quantity to calculate. In remote sensing applications, anisotropy functions can be derived for specific scenes, immensely simplifying the calculation of the net reflectance or (thereby) the net irradiance of a scene. For example, let the BRDF be where 'i' denotes incident direction and 'v' denotes viewing direction (as if from a satellite or other instrument). And let P be the Planar Albedo, which represents the total reflectance from the scene. It is of interest because, with knowledge of the anisotropy function as defined, a measurement of the BRDF from a single viewing direction (say, ) yields a measure of the total scene reflectance (Planar Albedo) for that specific incident geometry (say, ). See also Circular symmetry References External links