Optimal Breast Cancer Screening Policies, Junxiang Chen

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

Breast cancer is the most common non-preventable cancer among women. Although it has been demonstrated in randomized trials that mammography screening reduces the breast cancer mortality rate, the optimal screening policy is not known. When screening should start and stop, and the optimal interval between screening sessions are controversial issues. In this thesis, we present dynamic programming algorithms that find optimal variable-interval screening policies that can either minimize lifetime cancer mortality risk or maximize life expectancy. We evaluate these policies using a simulation based on the MISCAN-Fadia breast cancer model. By applying the optimal policies, we can typically either increase ...

Design, Fabrication And Assembly Of Multiple Biomarker In-Vivo Biosensor, Asanterabi Malima

Electrical Engineering Dissertations

High sensitivity and high specificity detection of disease biomarkers is crucial for early diagnostics and monitoring of diseases. Current cancer diagnostics tools are invasive and uncomfortable. Blood tests that are currently being used also lack sufficient sensitivity and specificity for early detection of diseases. In this thesis, a design for highly sensitive micron scale in-vivo sensor platform device for simultaneous detection of multiple disease biomarkers is presented. The biosensor microchip is 0.25mm in diameter, based on SU-8 polymeric platform fabricated incorporating four active isolated areas as small as 70µm x 70µm. Conventional micro and nanofabrication processes were used for ...

Envision - A Novel Computational Platform For Oncology Study, Jiawei Shen

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

We have developed a novel computational platform, ENVISION, for oncology pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) research and development efforts. ENVISION is an "evolvable computational environment" that mimics the stochastic behavior of cancer growth and development and generates virtual population over space (3-D) and time (1-D) and. For this purpose, we use a cellular automata grid composed of volumetric pixels (voxels) and model tumor biology across physiological scales (millimeters) on the grid. We use the ectopic xenograft tumor model in immune compromised mice as the test system. Specifically, we create a virtual mouse-like environment in the grid and "grow" tumor based on ...

A Low-Power, Highly Stabilized Three-Electrode Potentiostat Using Subthreshold Techniques, Melika Roknsharifi

Doctoral Dissertations

Implantable micro- and nano- sensors and implantable microdevices (IMDs) have demonstrated potential for monitoring various physiological parameters such as glucose, lactate, CO₂ [carbon dioxide], pH, etc. Potentiostats are essential components of electrochemical sensors such as glucose monitoring devices for diabetic patients. Diabetes is a metabolic disorder associated with insufficient production or inefficient utilization of insulin. The most important role of this enzyme is to regulate the metabolic breakdown of glucose generating the necessary energy for human activities. Diabetic patients typically monitor their blood glucose levels by pricking a fingertip with a lancing device and applying the blood to a ...

Quantitative Intravascular Near-Infrared Fluorescence Imaging, Georgios Mallas

Electrical Engineering Dissertations

Cardiac arrest caused by the rupture of atherosclerotic plaques is one of the main causes of death in the western world. Intravascular near-infrared fluorescence (iNIRF) imaging can be used to detect plaques at high risk of rupture, utilizing a catheter that delivers laser light to excite fluorochromes specific to molecules produced by inflammation and other biological processes associated with plaque formation. One significant feature of iNIRF imaging is its capability to image through blood. However, because of the absorption and scattering of photons caused by red blood cells, fluorescence intensity detected through blood is dependent on the distance between the ...

Computational Models And Methods For Ultrasound Tomography, Hüseyin Emre Güven

Electrical Engineering Dissertations

In this dissertation, computational methods are developed for modeling and reconstruction of ultrasound tomographic imaging. A fast method for computing the acoustic field of ultrasound transducers is presented with application to rectangular elements that are cylindrically focused. Our motivation is the rapid calculation of imaging kernels for physics based diagnostic imaging where current methods are computationally too intensive. Here the surface integral defining the acoustic field from a baffled piston is converted to a three-dimensional spatial convolution of the element surface and the Green's function. A three-dimensional version of the overlap-save method from digital signal processing is employed to ...

Corrections And Improvements Of Lung Imaging Under Optical Coherence Tomography (Oct), Ali Golabchi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

Visualization and correct assessment of alveolar volume via intact lung imaging is important to study and assess respiratory mechanics. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), a real time imaging technique based on near-infrared interferometry, can image several layers of distal alveoli in intact, ex-vivo lung tissue. However optical effects associated with heterogeneity of lung tissue, including the refraction caused by air-tissue interfaces along alveoli and duct walls, and changes in speed of light as it travels through the tissue, result in inaccurate measurement of alveolar volume. Experimentally such errors have been difficult to analyze because of lack of ''ground truth,'' as the ...

Parallel Image Processing For High Content Screening Data, Tamnun-E- Mursalin

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

High-content screening (HCS) produces an immense amount of data, often on the scale of Terabytes. This requires considerable processing power resulting in long analysis time. As a result, HCS with a single-core processor system is an inefficient option because it takes a huge amount of time, storage and processing power. The situation is even worse because most of the image processing software is developed in high-level languages which make customization, flexibility and multi-processing features very challenging. Therefore, the goal of the project is to develop a multithreading model in C language. This model will be used to extract subcellular localization ...

Multi-Mode Self-Referencing Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors, Jing Guo

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Surface-plasmon-resonance (SPR) sensors are widely used in biological, chemical, medical, and environmental sensing. This dissertation describes the design and development of dual-mode, self-referencing SPR sensors supporting two surface-plasmon modes (long- and short-range) which can differentiate surface binding interactions from bulk index changes at a single sensing location. Dual-mode SPR sensors have been optimized for surface limit of detection (LOD). In a wavelength interrogated optical setup, both surface plasmons are simultaneously excited at the same location and incident angle but at different wavelengths. To improve the sensor performance, a new approach to dual-mode SPR sensing is presented that offers improved differentiation ...

Detection And Localization Of Power And Coherence Dynamics With Eeg, Ayda Ghahremani

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

It has been observed by researchers that periodic auditory stimuli can cause the activities in different brain areas to be periodically synchronized. Fast auditory stimuli have been shown to cause the brain sources to synchronize at the rate of stimuli. Brain sources respond to them not only by increase in local synchronization, but also in the global synchronization of cortical regions often regarded as functional connectivity. Spectral power and coherence are often used to characterize such neural synchronization. Beta band oscillations have been reported to underlie the neural mechanism during repetitive auditory stimuli. Cortical generators of these underlying beta oscillations ...

Energy Harvesting Of Human Kinetic Movement, David Marusiak, Julia Carrillo

Electrical Engineering

Development of kinetic energy scavenging applications from the human body necessitates additional research to assist in designating a mounting position for a potential device. A data acquisition system adequately provides a parametric average power comparison among four locations on the body (waist, upper arm, hand, and calf) for both a male and female subject. Experimentally, the hand-held device provided the highest average power. Thus, subsequent investigation at set speeds provides further analysis of the output’s characteristically linear behavior. The physical energy-harvesting device features a plastic tube casing wrapped with the stationary coiled wire through which a neodymium magnet oscillates ...

Microcontroller Based Ecg Amplifier, Berney Montavon

Undergraduate Research Posters 2012

A microprocessor that reads ECG data and detects heart arrhythmias can help keep people safe while working in high-risk environments.

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation ...

Temperature-Dependent Dielectric Properties Of Tissue Phantoms And Tissue Samples At Microwave Frequencies, Yona Baskharoun

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Accurate knowledge of the frequency- and temperature-dependent dielectric properties of biological tissues is crucial in the development of ultra-wideband diagnostic and therapeutic technologies such as microwave breast cancer detection and hyperthermia treatments. This work examines the temperature dependence of the dielectric properties of the five tissue phantom-types developed by our group as well as porcine fat, muscle and liver tissues for the frequency range from 3 GHz to 10 GHz and for the temperature range from 5 °C to 45 °C. A systematic and simple measurement procedure is developed to measure the continuous temperature dependence of the dielectric properties of ...

In-Pixel Time Digital Converter For Time-Of-Flight Pet Imaging, Ebrahim Nemati Hosseinabadi

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

In the past decades, great advances in biomedical imaging towards using less invasive and more sensitive imaging modalities have enabled early detection of diseases through timely diagnosis of patients. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, as one of the recent imaging technologies, provides imaging from cellular-level metabolic changes in tissues. This gives PET imaging a substantial lead in detecting disease in their very early stages. PET imaging provides high sensitivity and chemical specificity. However, it suffers from low resolution compared to other imaging methods. Time of Flight (ToF) PET imaging, one of the derivations of the PET, improves the imaging by ...

Regularized Latent Variable Methods In The Presence Of Structured Noise And Their Application In The Analysis Of Electroencephalogram Data, Siamak Salari Sharif

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

This thesis provides new regression methods for the removal of structured noise in datasets. With multivariable data, the variables and the noise can be both temporally correlated (i.e. auto correlated in time) and contemporaneously correlated (i.e. cross-correlated at the same time). In many occasions it is possible to acquire measurements of the noise, or some function of it, during the data collection. Several new constrained latent variable methods (LVM) that are built upon previous LVM regression frameworks are introduced. These methods make use of the additional information available about the noise to decompose a dataset into basis for ...

A Low Power Electrical Method For Cell Accumulation And Lysis Using Microfluidics, Md. Shehadul Islam

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Microbiological contamination from bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Salmonella is one of the main reasons for waterborne illness. Real time and accurate monitoring of water is needed in order to alleviate this human health concern. Performing multiple and parallel analysis of biomarkers such as DNA and mRNA that targets different regions of pathogen functionality provides a complete picture of its presence and viability in the shortest possible time. These biomarkers are present inside the cell and need to be extracted for analysis and detection. Hence, lysis of these pathogenic bacteria is an important part in the sample preparation for ...

Preoperative Planning Of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery Under Uncertainty, Hamidreza Azimian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, a computational framework for patient-specific preoperative planning of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery (RAMICS) is developed. It is expected that preoperative planning of RAMICS will improve the rate of success by considering robot kinematics, patient-specific thoracic anatomy, and procedure-specific intraoperative conditions. Given the significant anatomical features localized in the preoperative computed tomography images of a patient's thorax, port locations and robot orientations (with respect to the patient's body coordinate frame) are determined to optimize characteristics such as dexterity, reachability, tool approach angles and maneuverability. In this thesis, two approaches for preoperative planning of RAMICS are ...

Metrics For Evaluating Surgical Microscope Usage During Myringotomy, Arefin M. Shamsil

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

Although teaching and learning surgical microscope manoeuvring is a fundamental step in middle ear surgical training, currently there is no objective method to teach or assess this skill. This thesis presents an experimental study designed to implement and test sets of metrics capable of numerically evaluating microscope manoeuvrability and qualitatively assessing surgical expertise of a subject during a middle ear surgery called myringotomy. The experiment involved performing a myringotomy on a fixed cadaveric ear. As participants, experienced ear-nose-throat (ENT) surgeons and ENT surgical residents were invited. While performing the procedure, their microscope manoeuvring motions were captured as translational and ...

Biomechanical Modeling For Lung Tumor Motion Prediction During Brachytherapy And Radiotherapy, Zahra Shirzadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A novel technique is proposed to develop a biomechanical model for estimating lung’s tumor position as a function of respiration cycle time. Continuous tumor motion is a major challenge in lung cancer treatment techniques where the tumor needs to be targeted; e.g. in external beam radiotherapy and brachytherapy. If not accounted for, this motion leads to areas of radiation over and/or under dosage for normal tissue and tumors. In this thesis, biomechanical models were developed for lung tumor motion predication in two distinct cases of lung brachytherapy and lung external beam radiotherapy. The lung and other relevant ...