Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Anus (SCCA) is a rare cancer that is heavily associated with high-risk human papillomavirus infection (HRHPV) of the squamocolumnar junction (SCJ) of the anus. Treatment of SCCA ranges from chemotherapy and radiation for early stage cancer, and surgical interventions such as abdominoperineal resection for later stage cancer. Patients who present with late-stage metastatic SCCA have a five-year survival rate of 32%, emphasizing the crucial need for early detection. Given its rarity in the general population (approximately 1 to 2 cases per 100,000 people), screening guidelines to allow for early detection of SCCA have not been fully established, and remains the subject of continuous debate amongst clinicians, researchers, and public health practitioners. A major challenge in establishing SCCA screening guidelines is slow progression of symptoms. 20-33% of patients diagnosed with SCCA were clinically asymptomatic at the time of their diagnosis. Patients who reported symptoms usually noted mild symptoms, which mimicked ones found in other anal disorders. For instance, early stage cases of SCCA frequently manifest as bleeding in the anus, but in the absence of other serious symptoms, patients and clinicians often assume hemorrhoids as a cause. As SCCA is a rare disease with that frequently presents with seemingly benign symptoms, if any, few studies have addressed the complexities of concerns in regards to preventive screening of SCCA. Using “Principles and Practice of Screening for Disease” by Wilson and Jungner, this thesis intends to discuss known screening strategies for SCCA and explore knowledge gaps in need of further study before definitive guidelines for SCCA screening can be established. Wilson and Jungner do not specifically address the issue of SCCA; rather, they provide a framework for establishing guidelines for disease screening. This thesis will examine the current understanding of SCCA gained in literature and will apply them to the ten tenets that Wilson and Jungner uphold as necessary criteria that should be considered in order to craft an appropriate screening methodology for a specific disease. These tenets address issues ranging from the severity of the disease in question, available treatments for the disease, and the economic perspective relating the cost of screening to the cost of treatment and management. Analysis of the ten tenets of Wilson and Jungner in relation to SCCA has revealed the need for the cancer research community to gain a better understanding of the role of high-grade intraepithelial lesions, which may act as a precursor to the development of SCCA; however, a significant portion of persons afflicted with HSIL have demonstrated the ability to spontaneously clear them. In addition, this thesis identified a need to gain a better understanding of HPV, especially in chronic variants. Further research to develop SCCA screening guidelines should also evaluate and weigh the effectiveness and practicality of different screening techniques; certain techniques such as anal cytology may be easily implemented on a massive scale, but may be less accurate. Though a rare disease, the progressive yearly increase in incidence (2.2% per year) of SCCA indicates that comprehensive screening guidelines are urgently needed. Using an analysis of a tried and true framework for establishing disease screening guidelines set by Wilson and Jungner, this thesis intends to contribute to the development of a standardized set of screening guidelines for SCCA. In doing so, we hope to allow SCCA to be managed in a manner that minimizes the impact on patients’ quality of life in a cost-effective manner.

Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP) is considered a rare autoimmune disorder which makes it difficult to accurately diagnose and creates a lot of opportunity for active research. With its wide array of presentations and even similarities to other neurological disorders, improvement must be made in the field of diagnostic methods in order to offer concise and effective treatments. As with many other neurological disorders, CIDP patients are at a higher risk for falls. The dual effect of gait impairment due to neuropathy and general effects of older age create a dangerous combination and increase the risk for falls. By increasing the accuracy with which physicians and health professionals predict falls in patients, they can effectively prevent serious injury and improve quality of life. Consequently, in order to predict the risk of falls, and therefore prevent severe injury, the ability to accurately access the specific qualities of the patient’s gait is critical. Without the ability to precisely identify patients’ particular gait impairment presentation it is very difficult to establish their risk for falls. The current methods of diagnoses focuses mainly on PROs (patient reported outcomes) which are often gathered through patient questionnaires. Previous research has shown that such methods are simply not detailed and patient specific enough to offer a complete picture of a patient’s condition. We believe ProtoKinetics Movement Analysis Software (PKMAS) is an objective, examiner independent measure of patients’ gait, and offers a method of quantifying patients’ functional gait outcomes in a way that is superior to the current standard of care procedures. Therefore, in this study we aim to reveal the shortcomings of current standard of care procedures in the diagnosis and treatment of CIDP, while also demonstrating the superior value of PKMAS in providing a detailed patient disease profile for CIDP afflicted individuals. Specifically, we demonstrate PKMAS’ increased ability to predict fall risk in CIDP patients, as compared with currently used methods. In this study PKMAS data was collected under two conditions: Dual Task and PWS (preferred walking speed). During each condition the patient was asked to walk across the Gait Map/Zeno Walkway as the ProtoKinetics Software collected detailed information about the patients’ gait. For PWS, patients were asked to walk across the map at a speed they were most comfortable at as PKMAS data was collected. For Dual Task, patients are asked to walk at their preferred walking speed while simultaneously doing a simple cognitive task, for instance, counting backwards from a hundred. This second condition is particularly important. The point of such a task is to mimic real-life walking. When we walk on a daily basis we are usually thinking or doing something else simultaneously, even if we may not be consciously aware of this. As such, comparing the results for PWS and Dual Task for patients can shine light onto their real-life gait experience. In order to do so, we measured the percent change in abilities between PWS and Dual Task walking. A greater change signifies greater gait impairment, and a change of greater than 15% places the patient at risk for falls. Among the PROs, INCAT is the one most often referred to in neurological standard of care and as such we focused on this particular questionnaire separately as well. To do so, t-tests were completed to demonstrate the lack of validity in scoring, by looking at the PKMAS data as compared between two INCAT scores. In this study we seek to demonstrate the superiority of ProtoKinetics Movement Analysis Software (PKMAS) over the current standard of care for CIDP patients. Specifically, in accurately evaluating patients’ gait and future fall risk. The ability to do so is vitally important for elderly patients who already suffer from decreased gait stability and the additional impact of CIDP can accentuate that risk.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is an interstitial lung disease of unknown etiology, in which excessive accumulation of scar tissue in the interstitial spaces of the lung obstruct normal pulmonary function. Currently, the only curative treatment is lung transplantation. While pharmaceutical therapeutics have been recently approved for use in IPF in 2014, they are still unable to provide a truly curative treatment. While genetic risk factors have been identified, the most commonly occurring mutation is only detected in approximately 38% of IPF patients, leaving an uncertainty in the very existence of a common genetic factor in IPF. Cigarette smoke and other environmental particulates have been significantly linked to the diagnosis of IPF, implicating an initial immunological response to trigger the pathogenesis of IPF. Nintedanib, a potent tyrosine kinase receptor inhibitor was first developed in 1998 as a candidate for cancer treatment. Investigation of its effects in fibrosis in the past few decades has led to a significant discovery of its application in IPF. Nintedanib significantly inhibits the fibrotic activity of fibrotic myofibroblasts in the lungs by inhibiting signaling cascades necessary for cell proliferation and progression of the disease. However, nintedanib falls short in that it cannot fully inhibit the advancement of the disease and mortality rates of IPF still remain high. Pirfenidone, the other currently available pharmaceutical therapeutic, was discovered in 1976 as a potent inhibitor of inflammation. Subsequent experiments further reviled its potency as an anti-fibrotic drug. After decades of research, pirfenidone’s mechanism of antifibrotic characteristics were revealed as a potent inhibitor of fibrocyte recruitment and chemotaxis, and as an inhibitor of transcription growth factor beta (a growth factor heavily implicated in the activity of myofibroblasts) mediated pathways. However, like nintedanib, pirfenidone fails as a curative treatment, only delaying the progression of the disease. In the search for new molecular targets for pharmaceutical therapy, forkhead box M1 (FOXM1), programmed cell death protein-1 (PD-1), and prostaglandin E2, have been identified to play a mediatory role in many of the pathways involved in myofibroblast activity. Many of these targets have also been identified in other disease models such as cancer and immunological inflammatory disease. Avasimibe has been recently identified as a potent inhibitor of aldo-ketoreductase through a FOXM1 mediated pathway. Its molecular mechanism in osteosarcoma cancer disease model may prove to be a novel pharmaceutical therapeutic for IPF. BI 853250, a novel focal adhesion kinase (FAK) inhibitor also demonstrates potential to be a new pharmaceutical therapeutic for IPF patients. Exploring signaling pathways that involve these newly found targets and collaborative research with cancer and immunological diseases shows promise in providing steps to cure IPF in the future.

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1967 S518 / Master of Science

No description available.

There are many forms of structure for the guiding of electromagnetic waves. A review of these forms is given by Barlow (1964). He describes the well established parallel-wire and coaxial lines, and hollow uniform waveguides. He also considers waveguides containing solid materials and gaseous plasmas, and beam and surface waveguides. This thesis is a report on investigations into the numerical computations of the propagation characteristics of three types of guiding structures namely, the hollow waveguide, dielectric loaded waveguide and the dielectric clad azimuthal surface waveguide. The numerical solution of the hollow waveguide problem is considered in Part 1. Chapter 1 contains a comprehensive review of the methods used for the solution of the waveguide problem. This complements the only presently available review, given by Davies (1972) who compares and discusses the relative merits of some current methods (finite difference, finite element, point-matching, integral formulations and conformal transformation). Some useful criteria established by Davies in his review for the comparison of methods are used in Chap. 1 (Sec. 1.3). Chapter 2 is concerned with the numerical solution of waveguides of arbitrary cross-section by the null field method which was developed by Bates (1969b). Accurate results are obtained and it is demonstrated that for shapes possessing sharp reentrant corners, the computational accuracy is improved by explicitly satisfying the edge conditions at these corners. The detailed numerical investigation provides the supporting evidence for the computational viability of the null field method. The complete point-matching method is derived from the null field method and it provides an insight into the straightforward point-matching method (Bates 1969b). Chapter 3 considers point-matching methods of solution. Results obtained using the complete point-matching method show that accuracies of about 0.1% are obtainable for waveguide cross-sections which are convex. Less accurate results are obtained for cross-sections that are strongly reentrant. The alternative point-matching method (Bates 1969b) is also briefly considered. By comparing results for a rectangular waveguide, the alternative point-matching method is shown to be more error sensitive than the complete point matching method. When the straightforward point-matching method (Yee and Audeh 1965, 1966b; Bates 1969b) was proposed and used by Yee and Audeh for waveguide problems, doubts were raised as to its universal applicability (Harrington 1965; Bates 1967, 1969b; Millar and Bates 1970; Lewin 1970) and an example of its failure was given by Davies and Nagenthiram (1971). The detailed investigations in chapter 3 show conclusively that the straightforward point-matching method does sometimes break down and give erroneous wave functions. Chapter 3 also relates the applicability of the straightforward point-matching method to the validity or otherwise of an internal Rayleigh hypothesis which is introduced; 3 and shows that the straightforward point-matching method is unlikely to produce correct results when the waveguide cross-section has reentrant parts. An extended point-matching method is next introduced in chapter 3 and is employed to obtain accurate results for some cases for which the straightforward point-matching method fails. The success of the extended point-matching method is further illustrated by the prediction of a particular mode for the ridge waveguide (Sec. 3.5.1.4) which seems to have been missed by a previous analysis (Beaubien and Wexler 1970) using a high-order finite difference method. Part 2 is concerned with the cutoff characteristics of dielectric loaded waveguides. A specialised form of a general polarization source formulation (Bates 1970) is given in Chapter 4 and is used in Chapter 5 to obtain formulas for the cutoff characteristics of a waveguide of arbitrary cross-section loaded with a circularly cylindrical dielectric tube. The significance of the derivation given in chapter 5 is that the unknown field in the dielectric is eliminated and formulas are obtained that are line integral equations for the surface current densities on the waveguide wall alone. The computational convenience of the formulas is illustrated by results for a square waveguide loaded with a dielectric rod. Confirmatory experimental results are also reported. The numerical computation of the propagation of an azimuthal surface wave is presented in Part 3. In previous analyses of the azimuthal surface wave the attenuation is assumed to be small. This assumption is generally only satisfactory for very small curvatures. An investigation without such assumptions is given in Part 3. The general external field for any circular cylindrical guiding surface is considered in chapter 6 and universal tables for the surface impedance are given. These results are used in chapter 7 to obtain the accurate dependence upon curvature of the propagation characteristics of a dielectric clad circular cylindrical guiding surface. General conclusions are drawn in Part 4 which also gives some suggestions for further research. The results of chapters 2 and 3, for the null field method and point-matching methods, are new. The formulation and results of chapter 5 (dielectric loaded waveguides) are also new, as are the derivations and results of chapters 6 and 7 (azimuthal surface wave). All the computer programs used, except for one subroutine, were written by the author, in Fortran IV with 8-byte (64 bit) words, and run on the University of Canterbury IBM 360/44 machine which has 128 Kbytes of core memory. The Bessel functions of the first and second kind used were computed from the ascending series (Abramowitz and Stegun 1965, formulas 9.1.10 and 9.1.11). The Lommel polynomials required in Part 3 were computed using the recurrence relation given in Watson (1968, sec. 9.63) and a standard. IBM subroutine (IBM System 360, Scientific Subroutine Package 1968, p.367), modified to double precision by the author, was used to generate the modified Bessel function K1. The following papers, relevant to this thesis, have been produced: Bates, R.R.T. and Ng, F.L. (1971), “Contributions to the theory of the azimuthal surface wave", Alta Frequenza, 40, 658-666. Ng, F.L. and Bates, R.R.T. (1972), “Null field method for waveguides of arbitrary cross-section”, IEEE Trans., Microwave Theory Tech., in press. Bates, R.R.T. and Ng, F.L. (1972), “Point matching computation of transverse resonances”, submitted to: Int. Jour. for Numerical Methods in Engineering. Bates, R.R.T. and Ng, F.L. (1972), “Polarization source formulation of electromagnetism and dielectric loaded waveguides”, submitted to: Froc. IEE(London).

College composition students and graduate assistant teachers were tested for their perceptions of coherence, focus, organization, and overall quality of essays written in the Japanese Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu rhetorical pattern of organization as opposed to the English Five Part Essay style of organization where the experimental essays were otherwise identical. These perceptions were measured on a 4-point Lykert scale. The composition students were also tested for their total recall of the essays. The data were analyzed by ANOVA, and no significant effect for treatment was observed. The results of this study suggest that for the Japanese Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu/English Five Part Essay pair the negative effects of native language rhetorical pattern on readers of the second language may be less important than the theory of contrastive rhetoric would suggest. Consequently, alternative forms of possible cultural interference such as cultural background knowledge (content) and the role played by writing in a culture warrant greater scrutiny.

A sport coach, besides providing training to improve an athlete's performance in his/her chosen sport, is also tasked for ensuring that the training and/or competition take place in a safe environment. This ability to factor safe practices is a challenge to any sport coach, especially when the people being coached have intellectual disability (ID). This study aims to explore the perceptions of Special Olympics (SO) sport coaches towards risk factors for injuries and safety issues when they conduct training with their athletes with ID through a self-administered questionnaire and interviews. The six respondents are all practising SO coaches in a SO National Organization with two being beginner coaches and the rest, experienced coaches. The three significant risk factors perceived by these respondents are: (1) Obtaining professional qualifications in sport coaching is very important, (2) Winning a medal is not the most important focus, and (3) Writing down safety plan is not important. It was also found that the coaches' main sources of information on safety practices are from attending SO courses and publications from National Governing Sport Bodies and that these coaches follow a general procedure when handling any injury in their training sessions. In addition, experienced coaches are more intense in their...

Computer scientists have made ceaseless efforts to replicate cognitive video understanding abilities of human brains onto autonomous vision systems. As video surveillance cameras become ubiquitous, there is a surge in studies on automated activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos. Nevertheless, video content analysis in public scenes remained a formidable challenge due to intrinsic difficulties such as severe inter-object occlusion in crowded scene and poor quality of recorded surveillance footage. Moreover, it is nontrivial to achieve robust detection of unusual events, which are rare, ambiguous, and easily confused with noise. This thesis proposes solutions for resolving ambiguous visual observations and overcoming unreliability of conventional activity analysis methods by exploiting multi-camera visual context and human feedback. The thesis first demonstrates the importance of learning visual context for establishing reliable reasoning on observed activity in a camera network. In the proposed approach, a new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is formulated to discover and quantify time delayed pairwise correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views. This thesis shows that learning time delayed pairwise activity correlations offers valuable contextual information for (1) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network, (2) robust person re-identification, and (3) accurate activity-based video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, the proposed approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it can thus be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featuring severe inter-object occlusions. Second, to detect global unusual event across multiple disjoint cameras, this thesis extends visual context learning from pairwise relationship to global time delayed dependency between regional activities. Specifically, a Time Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TD-PGM) is proposed to model the multi-camera activities and their dependencies. Subtle global unusual events are detected and localised using the model as context-incoherent patterns across multiple camera views. In the model, different nodes represent activities in different decomposed re3 gions from different camera views, and the directed links between nodes encoding time delayed dependencies between activities observed within and across camera views. In order to learn optimised time delayed dependencies in a TD-PGM, a novel two-stage structure learning approach is formulated by combining both constraint-based and scored-searching based structure learning methods. Third, to cope with visual context changes over time, this two-stage structure learning approach is extended to permit tractable incremental update of both TD-PGM parameters and its structure. As opposed to most existing studies that assume static model once learned, the proposed incremental learning allows a model to adapt itself to reflect the changes in the current visual context, such as subtle behaviour drift over time or removal/addition of cameras. Importantly, the incremental structure learning is achieved without either exhaustive search in a large graph structure space or storing all past observations in memory, making the proposed solution memory and time efficient. Forth, an active learning approach is presented to incorporate human feedback for on-line unusual event detection. Contrary to most existing unsupervised methods that perform passive mining for unusual events, the proposed approach automatically requests supervision for critical points to resolve ambiguities of interest, leading to more robust detection of subtle unusual events. The active learning strategy is formulated as a stream-based solution, i.e. it makes decision on-the-fly on whether to request label for each unlabelled sample observed in sequence. It selects adaptively two active learning criteria, namely likelihood criterion and uncertainty criterion to achieve (1) discovery of unknown event classes and (2) refinement of classification boundary. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated using videos captured from busy public scenes such as underground stations and traffic intersections.