Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modeling And Control Of Nanoparticle Bloodstream Concentration For Cancer Therapies, Scarlett S. Bracey

Doctoral Dissertations

Currently, the most commonly used treatments for cancerous tumors (chemotherapy, radiation, etc.) have almost no method of monitoring the administration of the treatment for adverse effects in real time. Without any real time feedback or control, treatment becomes a "guess and check" method with no way of predicting the effects of the drugs based on the actual bioavailability to the patient's body. One particular drug may be effective for one patient, yet provide no benefit to another. Doctors and scientists do not routinely attempt to quantifiably explain this discrepancy. In this work, mathematical modeling and analysis techniques are joined together …

Borel Complexity Of The Isomorphism Relation For O-Minimal Theories, Davender Singh Sahota '99

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1988, Mayer published a strong form of Vaught's Conjecture for o-minimal theories (1). She showed Vaught's Conjecture holds, and characterized the number of countable models of an o-minimal theory T if T has fewer than 2K ° countable models. Friedman and Stanley have shown in (2) that several elementary classes are Borel complete. This work addresses the class of countable models of an o-minimal theory T when T has 2N ° countable models, including conditions for when this class is Borel complete. The main result is as follows.

Theorem 1. Let T be an o-minimal theory in a countable …

A Mathematical Model And Numerical Method For Thermoelectric Dna Sequencing, Liwei Shi

Doctoral Dissertations

DNA sequencing is the process of determining the precise order of nucleotide bases, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine within a DNA molecule. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases in a strand of DNA. The advent of rapid DNA sequencing methods has greatly accelerated biological and medical research and discovery. Thermoelectric DNA sequencing is a novel method to sequence DNA by measuring the heat that is released when DNA polymerase inserts a deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate into a growing DNA strand. The thermoelectric device for this project is composed of four parts: …

Generalized Finite-Difference Time-Domain Schemes For Solving Nonlinear Schrödinger Equations, Frederick Ira Moxley Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) is one of the most widely applicable equations in physical science, and characterizes nonlinear dispersive waves, optics, water waves, and the dynamics of molecules. The NLSE satisfies many mathematical conservation laws. Moreover, due to the nonlinearity, the NLSE often requires a numerical solution, which also satisfies the conservation laws. Some of the more popular numerical methods for solving the NLSE include the finite difference, finite element, and spectral methods such as the pseudospectral, split-step with Fourier transform, and integrating factor coupled with a Fourier transform. With regard to the finite difference and finite element methods, …

Big Homotopy Theory, Keith Gordon Penrod

Doctoral Dissertations

Cannon and Conner developed the theory of "big fundamental groups." This is meant to expand on the notion of fundamental group and is a powerful tool that can be used for distinguishing spaces that are not distinguishable using the fundamental group. Turner proved several classical results, such as covering theory and Seifert-VanKampen for big fundamental groups. The purpose of this paper is to expand on the the theory, to refine the definitions, and to give more examples. Also, in this paper, we define big higher homotopy groups analogous to the way classical higher homotopy groups are defined.

Multiplicative Sets Of Atoms, Ashley Nicole Rand

Doctoral Dissertations

It is possible for an element to have both an atom factorization and a factorization that will always contain a reducible element. This leads us to consider the multiplicatively closed set generated by the atoms and units of an integral domain. We start by showing that for a nice subset S of the atoms of R, there exists an integral domain containing R with set of atoms S. A multiplicatively closed set is saturated if the factors of each element in the set are also elements in the set. Considering polynomial and power series subrings, we find necessary and sufficient …

New Microarray Image Segmentation Using Segmentation Based Contours Method, Yuan Cheng

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of the research developed in this dissertation is to develop a more accurate segmentation method for Affymetrix microarray images. The Affymetrix microarray biotechnologies have become increasingly important in the biomedical research field. Affymetrix microarray images are widely used in disease diagnostics and disease control. They are capable of monitoring the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. Hence, scientists can get a deep understanding on genomic regulation, interaction and expression by using such tools.

We also introduce a novel Affymetrix microarray image simulation model and how the Affymetrix microarray image is simulated by using this model. This simulation …

A Comparison Of Two Teaching Methods For Pediatric Medication Administration: Multimedia And Text-Based Modules, Renee Granados

Doctoral Dissertations

A Comparison of Two Teaching Methods for Pediatrics: Multimedia and Text-based Modules to Teach Pediatric Medication Administration

Nurse educators are in a position to design and develop effective methods that consider the cognitive structures and how the mind processes information to teach pediatric medication content to nursing students. The majority of methods teaching medication administration use only one mode: the visual mode. One mode to present leaning material does not take advantage of the additive effects of using two modes to present learning material.

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness of two teaching methods to present …

Sparse Group Sufficient Dimension Reduction And Covariance Cumulative Slicing Estimation, Bilin Zeng

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation contains two main parts: In Part One, for regression problems with grouped covariates, we adopt the idea of sparse group lasso (Friedman et al., 2010) to the framework of the sufficient dimension reduction. We propose a method called the sparse group sufficient dimension reduction (sgSDR) to conduct group and within group variable selections simultaneously without assuming a specific model structure on the regression function. Simulation studies show that our method is comparable to the sparse group lasso under the regular linear model setting, and outperforms sparse group lasso with higher true positive rates and substantially lower false positive …