Digital Commons Network^™

Classification Of Electropherograms Using Machine Learning For Parkinson’S Disease, Soroush Dehghan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses gradually over time. The onset of symptoms in people who are suffering from PD can vary from case to case, and it depends on the progression of the disease in each patient. The PD symptoms gradually develop and exacerbate the patient’s movements throughout time. An early diagnosis of PD could improve the outcomes of treatments and could potentially delay the progression of this disorder and that makes discovering a new diagnostic method valuable. In this study, I investigate the feasibility of using a machine learning (ML) approach to classify PD …

Improving Quantification Of Mitral Regurgitation Through Computational Fluid Dynamics And Ex Vivo Testing, Alexandra Flowers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mitral regurgitation (MR) is a prominent cardiac disease affecting more than two million people in the United States alone. In order for patients to receive proper therapy, regurgitant volume must first be quantified. As there are an array of methods to do so, the proximal isovelocity surface area (PISA) method continues to be the most accurate and clinically used method. However, there are some difficulties obtaining the necessary measurements need for this when performing transthoracic echocardiography. This study aims to evaluate and present techniques that may be used to more accurately quantify regurgitation through ex vivo testing and computational fluid …

Monitoring Of State Transitions In Extreme Environment Application Materials Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors, Sabuj Khadka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By embedding both a single fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor and a thermocouple (TC) during the manufacturing for extreme environment applications of certain classes of materials such as metals and polymers, a novel in-situ approach was developed to precisely monitor their entire manufacturing processes. This novel monitoring technique was able to identify many characteristic points during the curing of room and high-temperature epoxies and the solidification processes of metal alloys composed of tin and bismuth which were selected in this research purely for verification purposes. Some of the characteristic points identified for the epoxies were: (i) the gel point, (ii) …

Data-Enabled Distribution Grid Management, Zohreh Sadat Hosseini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 2020, U.S. electric utilities installed more than 94 million advanced meters, which brought the percentage of residential customers equipped with smart meters to 75%. This significant investment allows collecting extensive customer data at the distribution level, however, the data are not currently leveraged effectively to help with system operations. This dissertation aims to use the smart meters’ data to improve the grid’s reliability, stability, and controllability by solving two of the most challenging problems at the distribution level, namely distribution network phase identification and outage identification.

Distribution networks have typically been the least observable and most dynamic and locally …

Frequency Analysis Of Trabecular Bone Structure, Daniel Parada San Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medical data is hard to obtain due to privacy laws making research difficult. Many databases of medical data have been compiled over the years and are available to the scientific community. These databases are not comprehensive and lack many clinical conditions. Certain type of medical conditions are rare, making them harder to obtain, or are not present at all in the aforementioned databases. Due to the sparsity or complete lack of data regarding certain conditions, research has stifled. Recent developments in machine learning and generative neural networks have made it possible to generate realistic data that can overcome the lack …

Pulmonary Valve Replacement, Mina Shafiei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Currently, transcatheter pulmonary valve replacement (TPVR) is a well-established alternative for surgical pulmonary valve replacement (SPVR) to treat pulmonary valve disorders in patients with prior congenital heart surgery. Edwards Sapien 3 valve is a bioprosthesis originally designed for the aortic position but has been used off-label in native right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT). It is currently under clinical trial to get food and drug administration (FDA) approval.

This study is a comparison of the performance of Sapien 3 with surgical bioprosthetics. The in vitro tests result showed Sapien 3 experiences less degree of opening and effective orifice area in pulmonic …

A Water-Surface Self-Leveling Landing Platform For Small-Scale Uavs, Mbidi Santos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Because many of the most widely used UAVs, such as the Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), cannot land securely on sloped or fast-changing surfaces, there is a need to design better deployment and landing stations. This document proposes an approach to design a water-surface self-leveling landing platform by implementing the best concept to be used as a safe ground for UAVs to land and deploy on open waters. After conceptualizing multiple design ideas, these options were laid out in a decision matrix with four criteria: degrees of freedom, mechanical complexity, manufacturing, and cost. The chosen concept was the spherical parallel …

Structural And Hemodynamic Analysis Of Transcatheter Aortic Valves, Dong Qiu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure has become a well-established procedure for high, intermediate-risk, and low-risk patients. However, there is limited clinical data on the TAV's long-term durability, unlike SAV devices. Computational simulations can be an alternative way to evaluate the TAV devices. This dissertation aims to conduct structural and hemodynamic analyses on the TAV devices under different conditions using computational simulation approaches.

Initially, the impact of the bicuspid aortic valve on the TAV devices was evaluated. The result indicated that the CoreValve-like supra-annular self-expandable device was likely to have increased stress and strain on the leaflet when it …

Learning Approach For Fast Approximate Matrix Factorizations, Haiyan Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Efficiently computing an (approximate) orthonormal basis and low-rank approximation for the input data X plays a crucial role in data analysis. One of the most efficient algorithms for such tasks is the randomized algorithm, which proceeds by computing a projection XA with a random projection matrix A of much smaller size, and then computing the orthonormal basis as well as low-rank factorizations of the tall matrix XA. While a random matrix A is the de facto choice, in this work, we improve upon its performance by utilizing a learning approach to find an adaptive projection matrix A from a set …

Model-Based Testing Of Smart Home Systems Using Efsm, Cefsm, And Fsmapp, Afnan Mohammed Albahli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Smart Home Systems (SHS) are some of the most popular Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In 2021, there were 52.22 million smart homes in the United States and they are expected to grow to 77.1 million in 2025 [71]. According to MediaPost [74], 69 percent of American households have at least one smart home device. The number of smart home systems poses a challenge for software testers to find the right approach to test these systems. This dissertation employs Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) [6, 24, 105], Communicating Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) [68] and FSMApp [10] to generate reusable …

Humanizing Computational Literature Analysis Through Art-Based Visualizations, Alexandria Leto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inequalities in gender representation and characterization in fictional works are issues that have long been discussed by social scientists. This work addresses these inequalities with two interrelated components. First, it contributes a sentiment and word frequency analysis task focused on gender-specific nouns and pronouns in 15,000 fictional works taken from the online library, Project Gutenberg. This analysis allows for both quantifying and offering further insight on the nature of this disparity in gender representation. Then, the outcomes of the analysis are harnessed to explore novel data visualization formats using computational and studio art techniques. Our results call attention to the …

Multi-Agent Pathfinding In Mixed Discrete-Continuous Time And Space, Thayne T. Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problem, agents must move from their current locations to their individual destinations while avoiding collisions. Ideally, agents move to their destinations as quickly and efficiently as possible. MAPF has many real-world applications such as navigation, warehouse automation, package delivery and games. Coordination of agents is necessary in order to avoid conflicts, however, it can be very computationally expensive to find mutually conflict-free paths for multiple agents – especially as the number of agents is increased. Existing state-ofthe- art algorithms have been focused on simplified problems on grids where agents have no shape or volume, and …

Contact Simulation For Evaluating Patient Specific Surgical Guide Stability, Vincent Nierste

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study proposes a novel computational method to quantify guide stability for Patient Specific Instrumentation (PSI) guides. A finite element contact model was used to analyze the final position of PSI guides on a femur across a range of loading parameters representing forces applied by a surgeon during operative use. Separate segmentation methods were used for the guide and bone geometry to represent differences between segmentation and actual patient geometry. The region of loading parameters over which the guide exhibited a consistent final position was measured and reported as Guide Stability Score. The model was verified using cadaver specimens for …

Revision Total Hip Femoral Stem Micromotion And Statistical Shape Modeling Of The Knee, William Fugit

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first purpose of this thesis was to compare the amount of micromotion seen in the femoral stem in a revision total hip arthroplasty between simple loading conditions and loading conditions derived from activities of daily living, through the use of experimental and computational methods. The amount of micromotion at the bone-implant interface was larger for activities of daily living, with ranges of 200μm more than the largest simple loading conditions. The second purpose of this thesis was to compare measurements of accuracy in a statistical shape model between individual bone and joint-level models, specifically for the knee. Using computational …

An Investigation Into The Plate Fixation For Periprosthetic Femoral Fractures, Xiang Chen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Periprosthetic femoral fractures are the third most reason for reoperation after the total hip arthroplasty with an incident rate of approximately 6%. The Vancouver type B periprosthetic femoral fractures account for over 70% of all cases, while the sub-type B1 fracture (when the total hip stem is stable) has remained a clinical challenge due to incidences of severe complications after the standard plate-screw fixation. To seek biomechanically sound fixations for the Vancouver type B1 fracture, this dissertation developed a combined modeling and testing framework to investigate the efficacy of fixation for a Vancouver type B1 fracture using different construct lengths …