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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

A Machine Learning Approach For Predicting Clinical Trial Patient Enrollment In Drug Development Portfolio Demand Planning, Ahmed Shoieb May 2023

A Machine Learning Approach For Predicting Clinical Trial Patient Enrollment In Drug Development Portfolio Demand Planning, Ahmed Shoieb

Masters Theses

One of the biggest challenges the clinical research industry currently faces is the accurate forecasting of patient enrollment (namely if and when a clinical trial will achieve full enrollment), as the stochastic behavior of enrollment can significantly contribute to delays in the development of new drugs, increases in duration and costs of clinical trials, and the over- or under- estimation of clinical supply. This study proposes a Machine Learning model using a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) that is trained on a dataset of 100,000 patient enrollment data points including patient age, patient gender, patient disease, investigational product, study phase, blinded …


Investigations Of External Resources And The Impact Of Imaging On Patient Flow In The Emergency Department, Marisa Shehan May 2022

Investigations Of External Resources And The Impact Of Imaging On Patient Flow In The Emergency Department, Marisa Shehan

All Theses

The problems associated with Emergency Department (ED) crowding are numerous, varied, and complex. Though overcrowded Emergency Departments are frequently attributed to overcrowded hospitals, crowding is also impacted by bottlenecks in patient flow. While discrete-event simulation (DES) is commonly used to model ED flow, external resources are typically excluded from these models due to their complexity and the limited amount of known information for these processes. Instead, external resources such as consults, labs, and imaging are modeled using estimation and/or educated guesswork. In this study, the impact of imaging on patient flow was assessed through data analysis of specific imaging factors, …


Frequency Dependent Diffusion Kurtosis Measurement In The Human Brain With Oscillating Gradients, Kevin B. Borsos Aug 2021

Frequency Dependent Diffusion Kurtosis Measurement In The Human Brain With Oscillating Gradients, Kevin B. Borsos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Oscillating gradient spin-echo (OGSE) is an implementation of diffusion MRI that enables shorter effective diffusion times than the conventional pulse gradient spin-echo (PGSE) by periodically modulating the diffusion gradient. Measurements of the diffusion kurtosis, which reflects the degree of restricted diffusion, have previously been prohibited with OGSE due to technical limitations of clinical gradient systems. This thesis presents a novel oscillating gradient waveform that enables the measurement of kurtosis using OGSE without requiring advanced gradient hardware. Decreases of kurtosis are observed in OGSE acquisitions of healthy human subjects relative to PGSE, demonstrating the dependence of the kurtosis on oscillation frequency. …


Optimization Of Vaccine Supply Chains In Low- And Middle-Income Countries Utilizing Drones, Maximilian Kolter Jul 2021

Optimization Of Vaccine Supply Chains In Low- And Middle-Income Countries Utilizing Drones, Maximilian Kolter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite tremendous efforts from governments and humanitarian organizations, millions of children in low- and low-middle-income countries (LICs and LMICs) are still excluded from the benefits of immunization. The vaccine distribution in LICs and LMICs is challenging for several reasons, such as limited cold chain capacities, vaccine wastage, uncertain demand, and lack of access to immunization services. A promising avenue to address these issues is the utilization of drones for vaccine delivery. Drones can fly at high speed on direct paths and could enable on-demand deliveries to mitigate limited storage capacities. Further, their independence of road networks could allow them reaching …


Improving Ventricular Catheter Design Through Computational Fluid Dynamics, Sofy Hefets Weisenberg May 2016

Improving Ventricular Catheter Design Through Computational Fluid Dynamics, Sofy Hefets Weisenberg

Masters Theses

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shunts are fully implantable medical devices that are used to treat patients suffering from conditions characterized by elevated intracranial pressure, such as hydrocephalus. In cases of shunt failure or malfunction, patients are often required to endure one or more revision surgeries to replace all or part of the shunt. One of the primary causes of CSF shunt failure is obstruction of the ventricular catheter, a component of the shunt system implanted directly into the brain's ventricular system. This work aims to improve the design of ventricular catheters in order to reduce the incidence of catheter obstruction and …


Guidelines For Scheduling In Primary Care: An Empirically Driven Mathematical Programming Approach, Hyun Jung Alvarez Oh Aug 2015

Guidelines For Scheduling In Primary Care: An Empirically Driven Mathematical Programming Approach, Hyun Jung Alvarez Oh

Doctoral Dissertations

Primary care practices play a vital role in healthcare delivery since they are the first point of contact for most patients, and provide health prevention, counseling, education, diagnosis and treatment. Practices, however, face a complex appointment scheduling problem because of the variety of patient conditions, the mix of appointment types, the uncertain service times with providers and non-provider staff (nurses/medical assistants), and no-show rates which all compound into a highly variable and unpredictable flow of patients. The end result is an imbalance between provider idle time and patient waiting time. To understand the realities of the scheduling problem we analyze …


Developing An Optimal Model For Infant Home Visitation, Isaac Atuahene Aug 2015

Developing An Optimal Model For Infant Home Visitation, Isaac Atuahene

Doctoral Dissertations

The United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Canada and many other countries have accepted home visitation (HV) as a promising strategy for interventions for infants after births and for their mothers. Prior HV studies have focused on theoretical foundations, evaluations of programs, cost/benefit analysis and cost estimation by using hospital/payer/insurance data to prove its effectiveness and high cost. As governments and private organizations continue to fund HVs, it is an opportune time to develop and formulate operations research (OR) models of HV coverage, quality and cost so they might be used in program implementation as done for adult home healthcare (HHC) …