No description available.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults and has a median survival of 13.4 months. Convection enhanced delivery (CED) has shown promise for the treatment of GBM by allowing intratumoral delivery of therapeutics, bypassing the blood brain barrier. A fiberoptic microneedle device (FMD) CED catheter enables simultaneous delivery of laser energy and therapeutic. The laser allows for heating of tissue in the region of infusion, called thermotherapy. Thermotherapy offers the advantages of increasing the volume of distribution (Vd) of the infusate, as well as facilitating intracellular penetration of the therapeutic. We hypothesize that heating of brain tissue will increase infusate Vd in ex vivo CED brain infusions. Methods: Formalin fixed mouse brains were infused by FMD-CED with Evans blue for 1 hour at 0.1 μl/min, at 22°C, 37°C and 42°C (n=4 brains/group). The Vd was determined and compared using one-way ANOVA. Results: FMD-CED performed at 42°C resulted in significantly higher mean Vd (4.90+2.2mm3; p =0.03) than those at 22°C (1.49+0.4 mm3), although no differences in Vd were observed between the other temperature groups. 42°C brains demonstrated interstitial and intracellular distribution, while rare intracellular distribution was noted in the other groups. Discussion: The Vd of FMD-CED infusions is facilitated by sub-lethal thermotherapy. This study indicates that thermotherapeutic enhancement of infusate Vd does not occur exclusively via vascular mechanisms. Thermotherapy facilitates advective-diffusion by decreasing interstitial fluid pressure and increasing transcellular fluid transport. These results were validated in a companion in vivo FMD-CED study in the rodent brain. / Master of Science

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of adopting clinical care bundles for the enhanced recovery program (ERP) at the project site. The practice-focused questions explored whether care bundles from the enhanced recovery program (ERP) would achieve positive postoperative patient care experiences when compared to the traditional surgical care pathways. The concepts, models, method, and theories used for this project include the Iowa model, the plan-do-study-act model, lean methodology, Donabedian's framework, and Watson's theory of caring. The sources of evidence included the facility site analysis report to evaluate surgical inpatient complications, morbidity, and mortality rates. Over 100 items related to surgical postoperative inpatient details were retrieved from the facility site database. Using descriptive analysis of 31 postoperative surgical inpatients' demographics, body mass index data, 30-day readmission, and comorbidities, the findings indicated that the ERP is an efficient, cost-effective program with positive postoperative inpatient outcomes in comparison to traditional surgical care pathways. The impact of the evaluation of the ERP predominately improves patient outcomes, which is a positive social change to postoperative inpatients, families, clinical staff, and the project site operational and clinical performance. The implications of this study for nursing practice and positive social change include standardization of quality and patient safety in a dynamic healthcare environment.

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No description available.

Application of conventional theory of transport and deposition to small particles or large colloids, on the order of 1 micron in diameter, has received surprisingly little attention in colloid science. While the favorable deposition of colloidal particles ( < 0.5 micron diameter) has repeatedly been shown to agree with the Smoluchowski-Levich approximation for a convective-diffusion process, larger particles are known to deviate from this solute-like mass transfer behavior. The rotating disk, used in the experiments performed in this work, is a model experimental system that has been employed in the past to de-convolute and quantify the mechanisms of particle transport. Experimental evidence shows that particle transport to the rotating disk deviates from the predictions of the complete three-dimensional convective-diffusion equation, including hydrodynamic and surface-surface interaction forces, in that non-uniform deposition is observed over the surface of the disk. Fluid inertial effects, observed to be significant in capillary flow, have been suggested in the literature as an explanation of non-uniform deposition on the rotating disk. Calculations performed in this work show that while inertial lift forces are significant, they are not the dominant cause of non-uniform deposition. Instead, hydrodynamic blocking of available deposition surface area is shown to accurately describe experimental deposition profiles. The effect of particle size on surface area exclusion and hydrodynamic scattering are separately assessed to demonstrate that the blocking model is not only phenomenologically accurate, but also an important part of the mechanistic description of transport in the rotating disk system.

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No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Spaceborne wind scatterometers are designed principally to measure radar backscatter from the ocean's surface for the determination of the near-surface wind direction and speed. Although measurements of the radar backscatter are made over land, application of these measurements has been limited primarily to the calibration of the instrument due to their low resolution (typically 50 km). However, a recently developed resolution enhancement technique can be applied to the measurements to produced medium-scale radar backscatter images of the earth's surface. Such images have proven useful in the study of tropical vegetation3 as well as glacial5 and sea6 ice. The technique has been successfully applied2 to Seasat scatterometer (SASS) data to achieve image resolution as fine as 3-4 km. The method can also be applied to ERS-l scatterometer data. Unfortunately, the instrument processing method employed by SASS limits the ultimate resolution which can be obtained with the method. To achieve the desired measurement overlap, multiple satellite passes are required. However, with minor modifications to future Doppler scatterometer systems (such as the NASA scatterometer [NSCAT] and its follow-on EoS-era scatterometer NEXSCAT) imaging resolutions down to 1-2 km for land/ice and 5-10 km for wind measurement may be achieved on a single pass with a moderate increase in downlink bandwidth (from 3.1 kbps to 750 kbps). This paper describes these modifications and briefly describes some of the applications of this medium-scale Ku-band imagery for vegetation studies, hydrology, sea ice mapping, and the study of mesoscale winds.

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has long been the interest of researchers in chemistry, physics and engineering, especially since the discovery that SERS can probe into the system down to the single molecule (SM) level. Despite the large number of publications regarding the fabrication of SERS substrates, it has been a challenge in the field to quantify the SERS signal and universally compare substrates. Traditionally, enhancement factor (EF) is used as an indicator of substrate quality, but the EF calculation is hugely dependent on the estimation of the surface coverage and other factors that are determined largely subjectively. Therefore, this thesis aims at discussing other parameters that can also be used to evaluate different substrates. Six different SERS substrates of Ag or Au nanoparticles of different sizes were fabricated by nanosphere lithography (NSL) and characterized by electron microscopy and UV-vis spectroscopy. SERS substrates were mapped for different concentrations of a probe molecule. Through subsequent baseline correction and principle component analysis (PCA), the "intensity" of individual spectrum was obtained and the shapes of intensity histograms of each substrate were acquired. Instead of calculating EF, five criteria (six quantification methods in total) were employed to comprehensively evaluate the six substrates. These were density of hot spots (characterized by the number of zero-intensity events), enhancement (represented by mean intensity), spatial variation (calculated by RSD of intensity), repeatability (realized by cross correlation) and histogram shape (quantified by skewness and kurtosis). These new methods provide insights to the understanding of the properties of SERS substrates in terms of hot spots. Different substrates may exhibit better performance in terms of one criterion but worse in terms of others. Those variations in performance can be explained by their surface morphology. These more elaborated methods are believed to provide a more comprehensive approach to evaluate and compare substrates than the traditional EF values. The thesis also paves the way for future study on SM-SERS and fabricating better SERS substrates. / Graduate