Sleep apnea syndromes; Overweight persons--Health and hygiene; Obesity
Overweight and obesity is a major contributing factor in an estimated 70% of all obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) cases. Approximately five percent of the adult population has OSA, and the numbers continue to soar with the rising prevalence of...
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; Fetus--Effect of tobacco on
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are chemicals generated from the incomplete combustion of organic materials, including tobacco smoke. Some PAH are known to be mutagenic and carcinogenic in humans, and of concern for the fetus when women...
Enzymatic hydrolysis is the most common method of producing fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. Limitations to this step include the high cost of enzymes, and the time required to process the biomass. To increase the throughput and...
No current microfabrication technique exists for producing room-temperature, high-precision, point-to-point polymer nanofibers in three dimensions. Producing rounded structures in a third dimension is particularly difficult to accomplish with...
Obesity in children; Obesity in adolescence; Orthodontics
The purpose of this study was to determine if obesity impacts craniofacial dimensions in adolescent and teenage subjects. Twenty-one cephalometric measurements were selected as a basis for comparison between normal weight, overweight and obese...
Myocardial infarction; Glucose--Metabolism; Mitochondrial DNA
Heart failure is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the USA. During the development of heart failure, many cardiac parameters change at the same time including fuel metabolism, oxidative stress and mitochondrial function. Each of these...
A potential source of fine grained suspended sediments in a stream system is the
upper hillslopes of the drainage. Quantifying the sediment produced and transported to a
stream from these hillslopes is challenging because of the complex nature of...
Background . Heart failure treatment guidelines emphasize the importance of daily weight monitoring. To support this practice, the Health Care Financing Administration Heart Failure Demonstration Project (2000) was designed to evaluate the effect...
A hyper basis function network (HyperBF) is a generalized radial basis function network (RBF) where the activation function is a radial function of a weighted distance. The local weighting of the distance accounts for the variation in local scaling...
Conducting polymers; Polymers in medicine; Myocardium
Hydrophilic and conductive characteristics in polymers are mutually exclusive of each other. Hydrophilic polymer properties allow absorption of water up to several magnitudes above their dry weight. However, due to their molecular structure, they...
For complex classification systems, data is usually gathered from multiple sources of information that have varying degree of reliability. In fact, assuming that the different sources have the same relevance in describing all the data might lead to...
Background - Cranial cruciate ligament (CrCL) rupture in the canine stifle is a leading
cause of orthopedic lameness in the dog. Several corrective surgical procedures have
been developed to return dogs to pre-injury function following CrCL...
In this dissertation research, we aim to solve problems of two types of survival data, clustered survival data with potentially informative cluster size and sojourn time data. The methods for these two types of data are different. However, both...
Spinal cord--Wounds and injuries; Stretch (Physiology)
An increasing amount of healthcare resources is used for the treatment and prevention of contractures in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI), with stretch and passive movements remaining the most prominent intervention methods. The results of...
Fatigue--Diagnosis; Reaction time--Testing; Physical fitness for women; Women athletes--Physiology
Accumulated fatigue experienced during the competitive season can be detrimental to
athletic success. The purpose of the study was to identify a performance test that best correlated
with markers of fatigue in an attempt to detect accumulated...
Football teams--Ratings and rankings; Ranking and selection (Statistics)
A new method to rank football teams with the concepts associated with the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP) and Graph theory is developed in this thesis. A set of games is interpreted as a graph, in which every vertex represents a team, and every...
Background The anthracycline doxorubicin (DOX) is widely used as an effective antineoplastic drug. Cardiotoxicity leading to congestive heart failure is the primary factor limiting the clinical use of DOX. However, although a variety of approaches...
Drug delivery systems; Curcumin--Therapeutic use--Administration
Curcumin, a plant derived compound has shown significant potency against various chronic diseases like cancer in cell culture and animal studies. However, the introduction of this compound into clinical setting is limited by its poor oral...
This dissertation is concerned with investigating robust approaches for the control of pneumatic muscle systems. Pneumatic muscle is a novel type of actuator. Besides having a high ratio of power to weight and flexible control of movement, it also...
Pattern recognition systems; Land mines--Detection; Pattern perception--Data processing; Data mining
Traditional machine learning and pattern recognition systems use a feature descriptor to describe the sensor data and a particular classifier (also called "expert" or "learner") to determine the true class of a given pattern....
