acase@tulane.edu / Osteoporosis is a prevalent bone metabolic disease characterized by bone fragility. As a key pathophysiological mechanism, the disease is caused by excessive bone resorption (by osteoclasts) over bone formation (by osteoblasts). Peripheral blood monocytes (PBMs) represent a major systemic cell type for bone metabolism by serving as progenitors of osteoclasts and producing cytokines important for osteoclastogenesis. Our lab previously used microarray-based transcriptomics profiling to identify a list of novel genes for osteoporosis. My work is to further investigate the factors and regulatory network in osteoporosis, using microarray data of monocytes from subjects with extremely high/low hip bone mineral density. 1) We performed a pathway analysis and developed a novel approach to correct the “crosstalk” phenomenon which is caused by overlapping genes. 2) We analyzed the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) profile by re-annotating exon array and predicted the regulatory mechanism of lncRNAs on protein coding genes in bone metabolism. 3) We identified the important potential transcription factors for osteoporosis and inferred the regulatory mechanism which exists between transcription factors and target genes in bone metabolism. My findings not only reported the key regulatory factors (lncRNAs and transcriptional factors) contributes to bone metabolism, but also explored the potential regulatory networks in osteoporosis. / 1 / Yu Zhou

The research is focus on manufacturing one dimension lens plastic optical fiber array, carrying out by electrostatic force was applied to shape polymer liquid from hemisphere into paraboloid or near cone shape. In manufacturing process, the lens will be slanted by electrostatic force, so we shorten the electrode to solve the problem, and shorten the distance between fiber and fiber to manufacture the most small volume of the fiber array. To combine the two methods, we can manufacture the high coupling efficiency of the one dimension lens plastic optical fiber array. Finally, the above improved strategies are verified by the simulation and experimental results.

Giessen, Universiẗat, Diss., 1999.

Duisburg, Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr., 2000.

No description available.

An antenna array is overloaded when the number of cochannel signals in its operating environment exceeds the number of elements. Conventional space-time array processing for narrow-band signals fails in overloaded environments. Overloaded array processing (OLAP) is most difficult when signals impinging on the array are near equal power, have tight excess bandwidth, and are of identical signal type. Despite the failure of conventional beamforming in such environments, OLAP becomes possible when a receiver exploits additional signal properties such as the finite-alphabet property and signal excess-bandwidth. This thesis proposes three approaches to signal extraction in overloaded environments, each providing a different tradeoff in performance and complexity. The first receiver architecture extracts signals from an overloaded environment through the use of MMSE interference rejection filtering embedded in a successive interference cancellation (SIC) architecture. The second receiver architecture enhances signal extraction performance by embedding a stronger interference rejection receiver, the reduced-state maximum aposteriori probability (RS-MAP) algorithm in a similar SIC architecture. The third receiver fine-tunes the performance of spatially reduced search joint detection (SRSJD) with the application of an energy focusing transform (EFT), a complexity reducing front-end linear pre-processor. A new type of EFT, the Energy Focusing Unitary Relaxed Transform (EFURT) is developed. This transform facilitates a continuous tradeoff between noise-enhancement and error-propagation in an SRSJD framework. EFURT is used to study the role of this tradeoff for SRSJD receivers in a variety of signal environments. It is found that for the environments studied in this thesis, SRSJD enjoys an aggressive reduction in interference at the expense of possible noise-enhancement. / Ph. D.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.