Digital Commons Network^™

Human Cancer Genomes Harbor The Mutational Signature Of Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamines Nnn And Nnk, Michael Korenjak, Nuri Alpay Temiz, Stéphane Keita, Bérénice Chavanel, Claire Renard, Cécilia Sirand, Jiehong Guo, Et Al.

Michigan Tech Publications

BACKGROUND: Tobacco use is linked to multiple cancer types and a quarter of cancer deaths. Tobacco smoke contains numerous mutagenic chemicals such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), however, the mutagenicity of many chemicals in tobacco products remains underexplored. The tobacco-specific nitrosamines 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK) and N'-nitrosonornicotine (NNN), both International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 carcinogens, form pre-mutagenic pyridyloxobutyl (POB) DNA adducts, yet little is known about the associated genomic mutation landscape(s) in humans. METHODS: We applied bulk and error-corrected next-generation sequencing to a battery of experimental systems comprising mammalian cell lines and animals exposed to NNK or NNN, …

Clinical Validation Of A Novel Catheter-Tissue Contact Algorithm In Atrial Fibrillation Ablation Using Pulsed Field Ablation., Ankur Shah, Saanvi Billakanty, Andrew E Volio, Allyson Farrah, Andrea Robinson, Katelyn R Bennett, Arun K Tewari, Auroa Badin, David Nemer, Eugene Fu, Jaret Tyler, Anish K Amin, Nagesh Chopra

Heart and Vascular Articles

No abstract provided.

Comprehensive Study On Explainable Artificial Intelligence For Enhanced Decision-Making, Eman Taher, Wessam H. El-Behaidy, Doaa S. Elzanfaly

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are often criticized for their black-box nature, particularly in high-stakes domains such as finance, healthcare, and business decision-making, where transparency, accountability, and trust are essential. As machine learning advances with more complex architectures, including deep neural networks and ensemble models, the need for explainability becomes increasingly critical. This study focuses on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) as a key approach to enhance interpretability in classification, regression, and clustering tasks that serve as the foundation of data-driven analytical systems. XAI methods such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), and Integrated Gradients provide a means …

Juvenile Justice Professionals’ Perceptions Of Prevention Programs In West Central Florida, Terry Rachelle Harmon

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence And Leadership Styles Among African American Female Law Enforcement Supervisors, Hudson Cutno, Jr.

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Black Entrepreneurs’ Strategies For Sustainability, Barbara Davis

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Reducing Turnover At The Frontline: Hotel Leadership Strategies, Tamica Hales

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Organizational Demands, Worker Adaptation, And The Relational Ripple Effect In Child Welfare Case Planning, Mackenzie Alexia Leach

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Teachers’ Experiences In Teaching Foundational Reading Skills In The General Education English Language Arts Classroom In Grades 9-12, Jodi Leigh Mckenzie

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Managing Elderly Patients With Dementia Using Evidence-Based Non-Pharmacological Interventions In The Ed Setting, Rita Anue Cho

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Persons with dementia frequent emergency departments (EDs), but ED staff lack understanding of cognitive impairment and evidence-base management of these symptoms, which sometimes results to unsafe encounters, aggression, agitation and assault with or without injuries. As a result, staff may resort to physical or chemical restraints to maintain safety for patients, staff, and the milieu. It is essential for staff in the ED to understand the disease process, recognize behavioral triggers, and apply evidence-based non-pharmacological interventions. The purpose of this project was to provide education to ED staff to enhance their understanding of cognitive disorders and dementia in the elderly …

Behavioral Intentions And Use Of Telehealth Among Afro-Caribbean Immigrants In Florida, Patsy Patricia Lindo-Wood

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many researchers have documented the benefits of telehealth in managing cardiovascular disease and its risk factors. However, acceptance and use of telehealth among immigrants in the United States were low compared to other users, and little is known about Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their telehealth acceptance and use. Guided by the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, this study explored how performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions shape behavioral intentions and telehealth use among Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Port St. Lucie, Florida. A generic qualitative design with a purposive sampling strategy was used to interview 17 Afro-Caribbean …

Parental Participation And Engagement In North Carolina Medicaid Enhanced Mental Health Services For Children And Adolescents, Jonathan Andrew Traylor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Parental participation and engagement (PPE) are positively associated with improved treatment outcomes for children receiving mental health services; however, parental involvement remains inconsistent among culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged families served through North Carolina Medicaid enhanced mental health services. Barriers to communication, collaboration, and sustained engagement may limit parents’ active participation in treatment planning and service delivery. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore PPE among culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged parents whose children received North Carolina Medicaid enhanced mental health services. The ecological perspective of human development constituted the theoretical framework for this study. Data were …

Caregiving And Mental Health Among Mothers During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Makayla Elise Techentine

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic led to reliance on family members or friends to care for the sick, resulting in a burden of informal caregiving stressors and relationship to mental health. Guided by the stress process model, this quantitative, cross-sectional study aimed to assess the relationship between caregiving stressors and the mental health of mothers of children aged 18 years or younger who were serving as informal caregivers. Secondary data from the 2020-2021 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (N = 1,772) considered the independent variables related to caregiving stressors, including hours spent caregiving, time since becoming a caregiver, personal care …

Black Faith-Based Organization Leaders And Their Role In Mental Health, Alyssa Te'rese Green

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Blacks age 65+ have more mental health issues than others but underutilize mental health services because of stigma. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to identify what leaders in Black faith-based organizations believe their role is in supporting their congregants in accessing/attaining mental health services and how they provide support to their elderly congregants who may not have social support that could identify mental health issues. The health belief model and theory of planned behavior were used to explore mental health knowledge and support for the elderly congregants of faith-based organizations. Semistructured interview data from 10 Black religious …

Implications Of Weather Variability On Corn Yield In The U.S., Gideon Ayettey

LSU Master's Theses

Climate variability is a major source of risk to U.S. crop production, disrupting planting schedules and threatening yields. While prior research has explored the implications of weather shocks on crop yields, this study investigates the indirect channel via which weather variability impacts corn yield through planting delays in the U.S. Previous research has shown that U.S. corn production is highly vulnerable to short-term climate variability (Hu & Buyanovsky, 2003). We use county-level data from 2015 to 2024 for the top five corn-producing states and use a 2-stage least squares method to measure the effect. However, in our specification, planting day …

Ai-Driven Detection Of Neurodevelopmental Disorder From Emotional Speech Using A Hybrid Cnn–Bilstm–Attention Framework, Nayarah Shabir, Parveen Lehana, Sheema Khan

School of Medicine Publications

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) are associated with impairments in communication, behavior, and social interaction, making accurate diagnosis clinically challenging. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a major NDD, often exhibits atypical speech patterns characterized by altered prosody and reduced emotional expressiveness. The study proposes a hybrid dual-path framework for ASD detection from emotional speech using two strategies: PCA–GMM-based acoustic modeling and a CNN–BiLSTM–Attention architecture for spectral–temporal feature learning. The proposed framework captures probabilistic, spectral, and temporal speech characteristics for robust ASD classification. Acoustic analysis demonstrated clear separability between ASD and non-ASD speech, while the deep learning framework achieved stable and reliable performance across …

Perspective On Lessons Not Learned: From Coley’S Toxins To Microbial Drug Delivery, Guidance For Institutional Review Boards (Irbs), Brian P. Hanley, Alejandro J. Betancourt, Gustavo Gross, Wilbur (Bo) Bowne

School of Medicine Publications

The bacterial and toxin methods of cancer treatment date back 130 years. This paradigm rests on nonspecific bacterial-toxin-generated immunotherapy. This high-risk oncology research is experiencing a renaissance of methods that are among the most effective yet. Glioblastomas and other resistant cancers are the modern touchpoint, because of remission history following sepsis. Spurred by recent research deaths, we discuss protocols IRBs should consider in live bacterial or synthetic immuno-stimulatory trials. Human systemic inflammatory response syndrome immunology is unique due to non-functioning SIGLEC-13 and 17, which control excessive Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR-4) signaling. This is not a technicality like human CD8+/CD4+ T …

Bi-Allelic Loss-Of-Function Variants In Tmem63b Cause Syndromic Surfactant Dysfunction Disorder, Mir Reza Bekheirnia, Lindsay C Burrage, Matthew Hoi Kin Chau, Chaerish Eint Myet Chae Htoo, Eric C Kao, Shamika Ketkar, Wan Wan Lim, Xi Luo, Rifhan Mazlan, Elizabeth Mizerik, Kein Seong Mun, Kalyani R Patel, Lorraine Potocki, Christina K Rapp, Xavier Roca, Ana Saianda, Ignacio Iglesias-Serrano, Everlyn C Siew, Donald Yuhui Sim, David R Spielberg, Sok-Kun Tae, Jing Xian Teo, Julian Warfsmann, Fan Xia, Child-Eu Registry, Saumya S Jamuar, Ee Shien Tan, Matthias Griese, Weng Khong Lim, Meow-Keong Thong, Keren Machol

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Transmembrane protein 63B gene (TMEM63B) encodes a mechanosensitive ion channel expressed in alveolar type II epithelial cells, where it mediates stretch-induced surfactant secretion. While heterozygous gain-of-function variants in TMEM63B have been associated with developmental and epileptic encephalopathy, no human disorder has previously been linked to bi-allelic loss-of-function variants. Here, we report five individuals from four unrelated families with childhood interstitial lung disease and bi-allelic predicted loss-of-function variants in TMEM63B. Affected individuals presented with early-onset respiratory distress, chronic hypoxemia, and diffuse parenchymal lung abnormalities on chest imaging. One individual died in infancy, two underwent bilateral lung transplantation, and two require oxygen …

The Fingers-Based Occlusion Effect Triggering Methodology That Will Be Utilized For Creating Visual Imagery And Visual Patterns Utilizing A Pen Tool Where The Pen Tool Can Be Utilized To Create Visual Imagery And Visual Patterns On Physical Surfaces And On 3-Dimensional Virtual Space Areas., Punarjeewa Abeysekera

Defensive Publications Series

This paper describes a fingers-based occlusion effect triggering methodology that will be utilized for creating visual imagery and visual patterns utilizing a pen tool where the pen tool can be utilized to create visual imagery and visual patterns on physical surfaces and on 3-dimensional virtual space areas. The fingers-based occlusion effect triggering methodology will incorporate a pen tool, a built-in display that produce illumination, tracking markers and built-in camera configuration. The methodology will be required to utilize a power source that will be required to power the pen tool and its entities. And the methodology will be required to utilize …

Method For Trust-Aware And Language Model–Driven Email Threat Detection And Mitigation, Niranjan M M

Defensive Publications Series

Email remains the primary communication channel for enterprises and continues to be the most exploited attack vector for cyber threats. Modern email attacks increasingly rely on impersonation, social engineering, and contextual manipulation rather than traditional malware or malicious links, allowing them to evade existing detection mechanisms. At the same time, email security systems are adopting large language models (LLMs) to improve intent detection and contextual analysis, introducing new risks where email content itself can manipulate or degrade automated reasoning.

The proposal introduces a secure, trust-aware, and LLM-safe framework for automated email threat detection and remediation. The proposed system integrates sender …

Risk Authority Platform, Soumick Sinha, Mayank Johari, Lucas Fernando Müller, Sanjay Sawhney

Defensive Publications Series

Proposed herein is a Risk Authority platform that continuously computes an authoritative Trust Score and Trust Deficit for users or entities from heterogeneous security, identity, threat, compliance, privilege, and vendor-risk telemetry. The platform normalizes signals, applies configurable weighting and time decay, and maintains a versioned canonical trust state. A drift detection and reconciliation engine compares downstream trust states against the authoritative state and issues deterministic, idempotent reconciliation tokens when deviations or model-version mismatches occur. Software development kit (SDK) and application programming interface (API) integrations can validate schemas, verify tokens, and propagate risk updates. A closed-loop adaptive policy controller maps Trust …

Primitive For Finding Actionable Information In Time Series Based On Motif Locations, Michael Yeh, Yan Zheng, Junpeng Wang

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure relates to a system and method for finding actionable information in time series based on motif locations. The method includes an analysis computer that obtains time series data. The analysis computer generates a plurality of motifs. For each motif of the plurality of motifs, the analysis computer determines identified locations in the time series data that match the motif and determines a plurality of motif type scores based on the identified locations of the motif. The analysis computer determines a selected motif of the plurality of motifs based on the plurality of motif type scores for each …

Method, System, And Computer Program Product For Online Account Recovery, Elisa Duarte

Defensive Publications Series

Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for online account recovery. An example method includes: receiving an account recovery request associated with a user account a user is unable to access, the account recovery request including identity data and payment device data, the payment device data obtained via short range wireless communication in response to the user arranging the payment device relative to a computing device; in response to receiving the account recovery request, authenticating the chip based on a cryptogram; in response to authenticating the chip, inputting a payment device identifier and the identity data into a model …

Optimally Scaled Low-Rank Adaptation For Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning, Yilang Zhang, Xiaodong Yang, Yiwei Cai

Defensive Publications Series

A method can be performed during a round of iteration during a loss function optimization process. The method can include a computer obtaining a first matrix and a second matrix. The computer can determine a selected scaling process from a first scaling process and a second scaling process. The computer can modify the first matrix and the second matrix using the selected scaling process to obtain a first modified matrix and a second modified matrix. The computer can determine a first moment and a second moment based on the first modified matrix and the second modified matrix. The computer can …

Autonomous Mobile Robot For Transferring Planar Workpieces Between Processing Stations Using An Orientation-Holding Con­Veyor Stage And A Self-Locking Kinematic Dock, Alexander Willer

Defensive Publications Series

An autonomous mobile robot (AGV / AMR) transfers a planar workpiece — for example a printed circuit board — between processing stations by carrying a transfer-conveyor segment on a powered stage that holds the segment’s orientation independently of the robot’s heading. This lets a minimal-footprint, non-holonomic robot present the conveyor to a station port facing any direction, in confined space, without sweeping the segment through its diagonal. At each station a docking interface is provided that separates location from clamping: passive kinematic features (a fully-locating feature plus a relieved one, optionally tapered) locate the segment, while one or more self- …

Predictive Doppler Frequency Pre-Compensation For Non-Terrestrial Network Handovers, Edison Chen, Xuqiang Zhang

Defensive Publications Series

In non-terrestrial networks, for example, networks that use low-earth-orbit satellites, handovers between satellites may be subject to latency due to significant Doppler frequency shifts for the target satellite. This disclosure describes a predictive method for Doppler pre-compensation that may be centered at a user equipment (UE) (e.g., a smartphone, tablet, or vehicle-mounted terminal). The technique may involve the UE recording the magnitude of a frequency compensation value from its connection with a source satellite. For an initial uplink transmission to a target satellite, the UE may then apply a predictive pre-compensation value, which could be derived by inverting the polarity …

In-Band Threat Context Propagation For Distributed Policy Enforcement, Niranjan M M

Defensive Publications Series

The proposal introduces a data-plane aligned mechanism for propagating compact, actionable threat context in-band with live traffic to enable immediate and coordinated security enforcement across distributed environments. Instead of relying on centralized control-plane signaling or out-of-band policy distribution, the approach encodes deterministic enforcement intent such as action, severity, scope, and validity into bounded in-band metadata that travels along the same forwarding path as the affected traffic.

Enforcement points decode and validate this metadata in the fast path and apply policy actions at data-plane speed without requiring context lookups or external coordination. Rich threat details remain out-of-band and are optionally resolved …

System For Converting Predictive Insights Into Executable Tasks Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

Predictive analytics tools are highly effective at identifying organizational risks, such as potential employee turnover, but they often fall short in providing managers with clear steps to resolve these issues. To bridge this gap, the described technology functions as an intelligent intermediary layer that translates high level statistical risk drivers into concrete, multi-step intervention strategies.  When a predictive engine detects a risk, the system uses a retrieval augmented generation framework to pull relevant contextual information from an internal knowledge base, which can include organizational playbooks and historical success records. This specific context is then fed into a generative large language …

System For Context-Aware Data Redaction Using Instruction-Constrained Generative Ai, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

Data redaction techniques, such as manual review or simple pattern-matching, may present challenges related to speed, potential for errors, and contextual understanding for identifying sensitive information. The described system and method may be used for a context-aware redaction process that uses a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. Source text can be encapsulated within a detailed instructional prompt that guides the AI model's function toward identifying and substituting sensitive data. This process can be managed by an orchestration layer that is configured to interact with an AI inference engine, for example, under a zero-retention policy. By replacing identified data with semantic …

Prioritization Of Work Items Using Ai-Based Weighted Strategic Alignment, Tanmay Kayande, Deep Raithatha

Defensive Publications Series

Prioritization of work items within an organization can be a subjective and manual process, potentially leading to a disconnect between development efforts and strategic business objectives. A disclosed technology describes a system, for example, a computing device (e.g., a server, a smartphone, a wearable device), where an artificial intelligence agent can analyze unstructured work requests, such as feature ideas or bug reports. The agent may evaluate an item against a configurable registry of weighted strategic drivers, and can assign a numerical score and a natural language justification. A total priority score may then be calculated for a work item by …