Digital Commons Network^™

Development Of A Lab-On-A-Chip Device For Rapid Nanotoxicity Assessment In Vitro, Pratikkumar Shah

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increasing useof nanomaterials in consumer products and biomedical applications creates the possibilities of intentional/unintentional exposure to humans and the environment. Beyond the physiological limit, the nanomaterialexposure to humans can induce toxicity. It is difficult to define toxicity of nanoparticles on humans as it varies by nanomaterialcomposition, size, surface properties and the target organ/cell line. Traditional tests for nanomaterialtoxicity assessment are mostly based on bulk-colorimetric assays. In many studies, nanomaterials have found to interfere with assay-dye to produce false results and usually require several hours or days to collect results. Therefore, there is a clear need for alternative tools that can …

A Practical Guideline For Intracranial Volume Estimation In Patients With Alzheimer’S Disease, Saman Sargolzaei, Arman Sargolzaei, Mercedes Cabrerizo, Gang Chen, Mohammed Goryawala, Shirin Noei, Qi Zhou, Ranjan Duara, Warren Barker, Malek Adjouadi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Background

Intracranial volume (ICV) is an important normalization measure used in morphometric analyses to correct for head size in studies of Alzheimer Disease (AD). Inaccurate ICV estimation could introduce bias in the outcome. The current study provides a decision aid in defining protocols for ICV estimation in patients with Alzheimer disease in terms of sampling frequencies that can be optimally used on the volumetric MRI data, and the type of software most suitable for use in estimating the ICV measure.

Methods

Two groups of 22 subjects are considered, including adult controls (AC) and patients with Alzheimer Disease (AD). Reference measurements …

A Probabilistic Approach For Pediatric Epilepsy Diagnosis Using Brain Functional Connectivity Networks, Saman Sargolzaei, Mercedes Cabrerizo, Arman Sargolzaei, Shirin Noei, Anas Salah Eddin, Hoda Rajaei, Alberto Pinzon-Ardila, Sergio M. Gonzalez-Arias, Prasanna Jayakar, Malek Adjouadi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Background

The lives of half a million children in the United States are severely affected due to the alterations in their functional and mental abilities which epilepsy causes. This study aims to introduce a novel decision support system for the diagnosis of pediatric epilepsy based on scalp EEG data in a clinical environment.

Methods

A new time varying approach for constructing functional connectivity networks (FCNs) of 18 subjects (7 subjects from pediatric control (PC) group and 11 subjects from pediatric epilepsy (PE) group) is implemented by moving a window with overlap to split the EEG signals into a total of …

Delay-Sensitive Service Request Scheduling For Cloud Computing, Shuo Liu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing realizes the long-held dream of converting computing capability into a type of utility. It has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of the IT industry and our way of life. However, as cloud computing expanding substantially in both scale and scope, ensuring its sustainable growth is a critical problem. Service providers have long been suffering from high operational costs. Especially the costs associated with the skyrocketing power consumption of large data centers. In the meantime, while efficient power/energy utilization is indispensable for the sustainable growth of cloud computing, service providers must also satisfy a user's quality of …

Modeling And Simulation Of Enzymatic Biofuel Cells With Three-Dimensional Microelectrodes, Yin Song, Varun Penmatsa, Chunlei Wang

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering

The enzymatic biofuel cells (EBFCs) are considered as an attractive candidate for powering future implantable medical devices. In this study, a computational model of EBFCs based on three-dimensional (3-D) interdigitated microelectrode arrays was conducted. The main focus of this research is to investigate the effect of different designs and spatial distributions of the microelectrode arrays on mass transport of fuels, enzymatic reaction rate, open circuit output potential and current density. To optimize the performance of the EBFCs, numerical simulations have been performed for cylindrical electrodes with various electrode heights and well widths. Optimized cell performance was obtained when the well …

Using Sonic Enhancement To Augment Non-Visual Tabular Navigation, Jonathan M. Cofino, Armando Barreto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

More information is now readily available to computer users than at any time in human history; however, much of this information is often inaccessible to people with blindness or low-vision, for whom information must be presented non-visually. Currently, screen readers are able to verbalize on-screen text using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis; however, much of this vocalization is inadequate for browsing the Internet. An auditory interface that incorporates auditory-spatial orientation was created and tested. For information that can be structured as a two-dimensional table, links can be semantically grouped as cells in a row within an auditory table, which provides a consistent …

Exchanging Ohmic Losses In Metamaterial Absorbers With Useful Optical Absorption For Photovoltaics, Ankit Vora, Jephias Gwamuri, Nezih Pala, Anand Kulkarni, Joshua M. Pearce, Durdu Ö. Güney

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Using metamaterial absorbers, we have shown that metallic layers in the absorbers do not necessarily constitute undesired resistive heating problem for photovoltaics. Tailoring the geometric skin depth of metals and employing the natural bulk absorbance characteristics of the semiconductors in those absorbers can enable the exchange of undesired resistive losses with the useful optical absorbance in the active semiconductors. Thus, Ohmic loss dominated metamaterial absorbers can be converted into photovoltaic near-perfect absorbers with the advantage of harvesting the full potential of light management offered by the metamaterial absorbers. Based on experimental permittivity data for indium gallium nitride, we have shown …

Combined Economic And Emission Dispatch Incorporating Renewable Energy Sources And Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles, Amin Gholami, Mahdi Jamei, Javad Ansari, Arif I. Sarwat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Conventional transportation and electricity industries are considered as two major sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission. Improvement of vehicle’s operational efficiency can be a partial solution but it is necessary to employ Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) and Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) in the network to slow the increasing rate of the GHGs emission. However, it is crucial to investigate the effectiveness of each solution. In this paper, a combination of generation cost and GHGs emission of the two mentioned industries, as economic and environmental aspects of using PHEVs and RESs will be analyzed. The effectiveness of five different scenarios …

A Downsizing Strategy For Combinatorial Pmsg Based Wind Turbine And Micro-Smes System Applied In Standalone Dc Microgrid, Arif I. Sarwat, Amirhasan Moghadasiriseh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper presents a combinatorial standalone permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) based variable speed wind turbine (VSWT) and small-size superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) system into the DC microgrid system. The principal purpose of SMES system is to preserve power balance by absorbing power during peak wind generation and to release it during low power generation. This work accomplished by describing the optimized design of the SMES solenoid coil, ensuring the desired energy storage capacity based on the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. More importantly, the new control technique is developed for bi-directional DC-DC converter to level output power of the …

Optimal Reliability-Based Placement Of Plug-In Electric Vehicles In Smart Distribution Network, Mohammadhadi Amini, Arif I. Sarwat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Distributed renewable resources are one of the major technological inclinations that play a pivotal role in the future green power system. In this context, high penetration of Plug-In Electric Vehicles (PIEVs) may bring many challenges for the smart grid. PIEVs’ unscheduled utilization will cause technical issues for both generation side and demand side. High penetration of PIEVs may lead to reliability deterioration of smart distribution network. In this paper, firstly a PIEV owner behavior model is introduced. The output of this model is the hourly demand of PIEVs per day. Secondly, a comprehensive reliability-based objective function is proposed to allocate …

Mining The Online Social Network Data: Influence, Summarization, And Organization, Jingxuan Li

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online Social Network (OSN) services provided by Internet companies bring people together to chat, share the information, and enjoy the information. Meanwhile, huge amounts of data are generated by those services (they can be regarded as the social media ) every day, every hour, even every minute, and every second. Currently, researchers are interested in analyzing the OSN data, extracting interesting patterns from it, and applying those patterns to real-world applications. However, due to the large-scale property of the OSN data, it is difficult to effectively analyze it.

This dissertation focuses on applying data mining and information retrieval techniques to …

Real-Time Scheduling Of Embedded Applications On Multi-Core Platforms, Ming Fan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past several decades, we have experienced the tremendous growth, in both scale and scope, of real-time embedded systems, thanks largely to the advances in IC technology. However, the traditional approach to get performance boost by increasing CPU frequency has been a way of past. Researchers from both industry and academia are turning their focus to multi-core architectures for continuous improvement of computing performance. In our research, we seek to develop efficient scheduling algorithms and analysis methods in the design of real-time embedded systems on multi-core platforms. Real-time systems are the ones with the response time as critical as …