Inflammation is now recognized as an important factor in several age-related diseases such as arthritis, atherosclerosis, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. In each case, sub-clinical chronic inflammation occurs over years and leads to progressive...
Human arylamine N-acetyltransferase (NAT) is a phase II cytosolic enzyme that occurs as two isozymes, NAT1 and NAT2. This family of polymorphic enzymes catalyzes the detoxification and/or activation of many aromatic and heterocyclic amine drugs and...
Introduction: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a clinical condition affecting over 27 million Americans. There is no known cure for OA other than replacing the diseased joint with a joint prosthesis, total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Purpose: This study...
The use of a fluidized bed dryer to dry acrylo-nitrile-
butadiene-styrene terpolymer was studied. Data for
fluidized bed drying were obtained from the Monsanto
Company's fluid bed dryer. Fluid bed theory, drying
phenomena, and fluid bed drying...
The pulvinar is the largest nucleus of the human dorsal thalamus and is affected in a variety of brain disorders, such as schizophrenia. The experiments described in this dissertation elucidate key features of tecto-pulvino-cortical pathways as a...
The aim of this study was to determine if playing 5 soccer matches in 4 weeks after 8 weeks of strength, conditioning and soccer training further improves aerobic and anaerobic performances. Ten college soccer players (20.1 ± 1.2 yr) completed...
This quantitative dissertation examines outcomes of a required service-learning program at a faith-based institution. Two hundred and ten students completed a pre/post survey administered to a sophomore level class about background, educational...
Background: Emerging circulatory support devices that operate in counterpulsation to the native heart require synchronized timing of device ejection and filling on a beat-to-beat basis with the native heart using a patient's ECG. Surface leads are...
The aim of the study is to determine factors contributing to satisfaction with orthognathic surgery. It was hypothesized that specific factors contribute to the patient's perception of success. 37 patients who had orthodontic/orthognathic surgery...
Radio frequency allocation; Wireless communication systems
Recently, the need for wireless and mobile communications has grown tremendously and it is expected that the number of users to be supported will increase with high rates in the next few years. Not only the number of users, but also the required...
The phase II clinical trial is a critical step in the drug development process. In the oncology setting, phase II studies typically evaluate one primary endpoint, which is efficacy. In practice, a binary measurement representing the response to the...
A connected matching in a graph is a set of disjoint edges such that, for any pair of these edges, there is another edge of the graph incident to both of them. This dissertation investigates two problems related to finding large connected matchings...
Heart--Diseases--Diagnosis; Diagnostic imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Imaging systems in medicine
Many cardiac diseases, such as myocardial ischemia, secondary to coronary artery disease, may be identified and localized through the analysis of cardiac deformations. Early efforts for quantifying ventricular wall motion used surgical implantation...
Current high-throughput gene expression experiments have a straightforward design of examining
the gene expression of one group or condition relative to that of another. The data is typically
analyzed as if they represent strictly intracellular...
In blood coagulation, the serine protease thrombin is a multifaceted enzyme that interacts with multiple proteins. Thrombin utilizes two anion binding exosites (ABE-I and II) to supplement binding to fibrinogen and to the platelet receptor GpIbα,...
The thesis focuses on improving the flowrate of the Knudsen gas pump. The Knudsen pump uses thermal transpiration as the driving mechanism to pump gas. It is a motionless gas pump as the pump does not require any moving actuators for pumping. The...
Dynamic analysis and parameter identification of a single mass elastomeric isolation system represented by Maxwell model is examined using both analytical and experimental approaches in this dissertation. Influences that the stiffness and damping...
Optimizing queries in a distributed database is quite difficult. This work proposes defining new generalized quantifiers which operate on sets rather than tuples. These quantifiers would allow for easier optimization in a horizontally distributed...
Hyaluronan (HA) is a major structural component of the ocular vitreous humor
(VH) and lipids are essential building blocks of cell membranes. However, little is known
about their possible interactions. The VH is known to undergo liquefaction...
Crossover design is a type of longitudinal study with each subject receiving different treatments in different time periods. It has been used frequently in the pharmaceutical industry and other medical fields to investigate the safety and efficacy...
