Computer Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Soft Robotic Approach For An Intra-Abdominal Wireless Laparoscopic Camera, Hui Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

In Single-Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS), the Magnetic Anchoring and Guidance System (MAGS) arises as a promising technique to provide larger workspaces and field of vision for the laparoscopes, relief space for other instruments, and require fewer incisions. Inspired by MAGS, many concept designs related to fully insertable magnetically driven laparoscopes are developed and tested on the transabdominal operation. However, ignoring the tissue interaction and insertion procedure, most of the designs adopt rigid structures, which not only damage the patients' tissue with excess stress concentration and sliding motion but also require complicated operation for the insertion. Meanwhile, lacking state tracking of …

Addressing Security Challenges In Embedded Systems And Multi-Tenant Fpgas, Georgios Provelengios

Doctoral Dissertations

Embedded systems and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become crucial parts of the infrastructure that supports our modern technological world. Given the multitude of threats that are present, the need for secure computing systems is undeniably greater than ever. Embedded systems and FPGAs are governed by characteristics that create unique security challenges and vulnerabilities. Despite their array of uses, embedded systems are often built with modest microprocessors that do not support the conventional security solutions used by workstations, such as virus scanners. In the first part of this dissertation, a microprocessor defense mechanism that uses a hardware monitor to protect …

Time-Difference Circuits: Methodology, Design, And Digital Realization, Shuo Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis presents innovations for a special class of circuits called Time Difference (TD) circuits. We introduce a signal processing methodology with TD signals that alters the target signal from a magnitude perspective to time interval between two time events and systematically organizes the primary TD functions abstracted from existing TD circuits and systems. The TD circuits draw attention from a broad range of application fields. In addition, highly evolved complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology suffers from various problems related to voltage and current amplitude signal processing methods. Compared to traditional analog and digital circuits, TD circuits bring several compelling features: …

Learning Multimodal Structures In Computer Vision, Ali Taalimi

Doctoral Dissertations

A phenomenon or event can be received from various kinds of detectors or under different conditions. Each such acquisition framework is a modality of the phenomenon. Due to the relation between the modalities of multimodal phenomena, a single modality cannot fully describe the event of interest. Since several modalities report on the same event introduces new challenges comparing to the case of exploiting each modality separately.

We are interested in designing new algorithmic tools to apply sensor fusion techniques in the particular signal representation of sparse coding which is a favorite methodology in signal processing, machine learning and statistics to …

Skybridge: A New Nanoscale 3-D Computing Framework For Future Integrated Circuits, Mostafizur Rahman

Doctoral Dissertations

Continuous scaling of CMOS has been the major catalyst in miniaturization of integrated circuits (ICs) and crucial for global socio-economic progress. However, continuing the traditional way of scaling to sub-20nm technologies is proving to be very difficult as MOSFETs are reaching their fundamental performance limits [1] and interconnection bottleneck is dominating IC operational power and performance [2]. Migrating to 3-D, as a way to advance scaling, has been elusive due to inherent customization and manufacturing requirements in CMOS architecture that are incompatible with 3-D organization. Partial attempts with die-die [3] and layer-layer [4] stacking have their own limitations [5]. We …

A Magnetic Actuated Fully Insertable Robotic Camera System For Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery, Xiaolong Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a common surgical procedure which makes tiny incisions in the patients anatomy, inserting surgical instruments and using laparoscopic cameras to guide the procedure. Compared with traditional open surgery, MIS allows surgeons to perform complex surgeries with reduced trauma to the muscles and soft tissues, less intraoperative hemorrhaging and postoperative pain, and faster recovery time. Surgeons rely heavily on laparoscopic cameras for hand-eye coordination and control during a procedure. However, the use of a standard laparoscopic camera, achieved by pushing long sticks into a dedicated small opening, involves multiple incisions for the surgical instruments. Recently, single …