Computer Engineering Commons^™

Design Of Plastic Contaminant Eliminator In Seed Cotton, Joshua H. Tandio

Theses and Dissertations

Plastic contamination in cotton is a problem in cotton industry and researchers have worked on this problem with different approaches. This thesis documents the design of mechanical and electronic real-time systems for detecting and removing plastic contaminants. The mechanical system was designed to expose plastic embedded inside the seed cotton to the sensor and to separate plastic contaminated cotton from the process stream. The detection system consisted of an embedded computer interfaced with a USB camera and Neural Network (NN) software running in it. Two NN models were tested, a transfer learning model and a built-from-scratch original model. The original …

Generation, Analysis, And Evaluation Of Patient-Specific, Osteoligamentous, Spine Meshes, Austin R. Tapp

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, is traditionally corrected with bracing treatments or by a highly invasive posterior spinal fusion (PSF) operation. These correction strategies are constrained by current imaging modalities, which fail to elucidate the soft tissue anatomy that is known to play a critical role in spinal stiffness and overall structure. Osteoligamentous segmentations of the spinal column offer a foundation for downstream finite element (FE) studies seeking to optimize bracing treatments or determine ideal surgical approaches.

This thesis presents methods for automatically and semi-automatically segmenting vertebrae and surrounding soft tissues of the spinal column using X-ray computed …

Interrelation Of Thermal Stimulation With Haptic Perception, Emotion, And Memory, Mehdi Hojatmadani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Haptics is an interdisciplinary field of science that deals with how humans perceive and respond to different sensory cues perceived through touch. Thermal haptics as a branch deals with how humans perceive the temperature sensation and respond to that. The process in which thermal perception occurs is well known to researchers. What seems missing in the literature is how temperature interacts or sometimes intervenes in other physiological and psychological aspects of our lives. In this research, a series of studies are presented where the main focus was how temperature and brain interact with each other to impede or enhance our …

Machine Learning Based Model For The Detection Of Brain Aneurysms From Mr Angiography, Katherine Becknell, Claire Bushnell, Rachel Fitzsimmons, Emily Sumner

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

A brain aneurysm is a thin or weak spot on a blood vessel wall that expands and fills with blood. Brain aneurysms are very dangerous due to the fact that in most cases, patients do not show any symptoms. Because of this, aneurysms are difficult to diagnose unless it becomes very large or ruptures, resulting in fatal hemorrhage.

Aneurysms can be detected by a number of different brain imaging methods including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA), Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) and other imaging methods but for the sake of this report we will only be focusing on …

Development Of A Wearable Haptic Feedback Device For Upper Limb Prosthetics Through Sensory Substitution, Marco B.S. Gallone

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Haptics can enable a direct communication pipeline between the artificial limb and the brain; adding haptic sensory feedback for prosthesis wearers is believed to improve operation without drawing too much of the user's attention. Through neuroplasticity, the brain can become more cognizant of the information delivered through the skin and may eventually interpret it as inherently as other natural senses. In this thesis, a wearable haptic feedback device (WHFD) is developed to communicate prosthesis sensory information. A 14-week, 6-stage, between subjects study was created to investigate the learning trajectory as participants were stimulated with haptic patterns conveying joint proprioception. 37 …

Machine Learning Approaches For Lung Cancer Diagnosis., Ahmed Mahmoud Ahmed Shaffie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The enormity of changes and development in the field of medical imaging technology is hard to fathom, as it does not just represent the technique and process of constructing visual representations of the body from inside for medical analysis and to reveal the internal structure of different organs under the skin, but also it provides a noninvasive way for diagnosis of various disease and suggest an efficient ways to treat them. While data surrounding all of our lives are stored and collected to be ready for analysis by data scientists, medical images are considered a rich source that could provide …

Scalable Approaches For Auditing The Completeness Of Biomedical Ontologies, Fengbo Zheng

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

An ontology provides a formalized representation of knowledge within a domain. In biomedicine, ontologies have been widely used in modern biomedical applications to enable semantic interoperability and facilitate data exchange. Given the important roles that biomedical ontologies play, quality issues such as incompleteness, if not addressed, can affect the quality of downstream ontology-driven applications. However, biomedical ontologies often have large sizes and complex structures. Thus, it is infeasible to uncover potential quality issues through manual effort. In this dissertation, we introduce automated and scalable approaches for auditing the completeness of biomedical ontologies. We mainly focus on two incompleteness issues -- …

A Deep Learning Approach To Lncrna Subcellular Localization Using Inexact Q-Mer, Weijun Yi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Long non coding Ribonucleic Acids (lncRNAs) can be localized to different cellular components, such as the nucleus, exosome, cytoplasm, ribosome, etc. Their biological functions can be influenced by the region of the cell they are located. Many of these lncRNAs are associated with different challenging diseases. Thus, it is crucial to study their subcellular localization. However, compared to the vast number of lncRNAs, only relatively few have annotations in terms of their subcellular localization. Conventional computational methods use q-mer profiles from lncRNA sequences and then train machine learning models, such as support vector machines and logistic regression with the profiles. …