La chimioradiothérapie est le traitement des cancers de l’œsophage localement évolués et inopérables. Dans cette indication, la radiothérapie conformationnelle est utilisée couramment. Cependant, le pronostic de ces patients reste sombre. L’intérêt de la radiothérapie asservie à la respiration (RAR) a déjà été montré notamment dans le traitement des cancers pulmonaires, mammaires et hépatiques : elle permet de diminuer l’irradiation des tissus sains, et d’envisager une augmentation de dose au volume tumoral. Afin d’améliorer la prise en charge radiothérapique, nous proposons d’étudier la faisabilité de la RAR dans le traitement des cancers de l’œsophage. Nous étudierons la mobilité des cancers oesophagiens au cours de la respiration pour optimiser la définition des volumes cibles et notamment de la marge interne (IM). Nous analyserons la corrélation existant entre les mouvements tumoraux et les mouvements de la paroi thoracique afin de montrer que le mouvement des tumeurs oesophagiennes est induit par la respiration, pré-requis indispensable à l’utilisation des systèmes d’asservissement en respiration libre. Nous utiliserons différents outils d’analyse dosimétrique pour évaluer l’apport de la RAR dans le traitement des cancers de l’œsophage en comparant les plans dosimétriques effectués à différents temps respiratoires (fin d’expiration, fin d’inspiration et inspiration forcée) avec le plan dosimétrique effectué en respiration libre pour la même tumeur. Ceci nous permettra de quantifier le gain obtenu par la RAR et de déterminer la meilleure « fenêtre » de traitement au cours du cycle respiratoire en fonction des différents systèmes d’asservissement disponibles. Cette analyse dosimétrique sera complétée par un calcul de l’Equivalent de Dose Uniforme (EUD), dans sa forme linéaire quadratique, pour les différents volumes d’intérêt. Nous déterminerons au préalable ses conditions d’utilisation dans une étude théorique de dégradation des HDV / Chemoradiotherapy is now the standard treatment for locally advanced or inoperable esophageal carcinoma. In this indication, conformal radiotherapy is generally used. However, prognosis remains poor for these patients.Respiratory gating radiotherapy can decrease healthy tissus irradiation and allows escalation dose in lung, liver and breast cancer. In order to improve radiotherapy technique, we propose to study the feasibility of respiratory gating for esophageal cancer.We will study the respiratory motions of esophageal cancer to optimize target volume delineation, especially the internal margin (IM).We will test the correlation between tumour and chest wall displacements to prove that esophageal cancer motions are induced by respiration. This is essential before using free breathing respiratory gating systems.We will work out the dosimetric impact of respiratory gating using various dosimetric analysis parameters. We will compare dosimetric plans at end expiration, end inspiration and deep inspiration with dosimetric plan in free-breathing condition. This will allow us to establish the best respiratory phase to irradiate for each gating system.This dosimetric study will be completed with linear quadratic equivalent uniform dose (EUD) calculation for each volume of interest. Previously, we will do a theoretical study of histogram dose volume gradation to point up its use

We have shown that repeated neonatal quinpirole (QUIN; a dopamine D2-like receptor agonist) treatment in rats produces long-lasting supersensitization of dopamine D2 receptors that persists into adulthood but without producing a change in receptor number. The current study was designed to analyze the effects of neonatal QUIN on auditory sensorimotor gating as measured through prepulse inhibition (PPI). Male and female Sprague–Dawley rats were neonatally treated with QUIN (1mg/kg) or saline from postnatal days (P)1–21. At P60, the number of yawns was recorded for a 1h period in response to an acute QUIN (1mg/kg) injection as yawning is a D2-like receptor mediated behavioral event. Five days later, rats began (PPI) behavioral testing in two phases. In phase I, three different prepulse intensities (73, 76, and 82dB) were administered 100-ms before a 115dB pulse on 10 consecutive days. In phase II, three different interstimulus intervals (ISI; 50, 100, and 150ms) were inserted between the 73 or 76dB prepulse and 115dB pulse over 10 consecutive days of testing. A PPI probe trial was administered at the end of each phase after an acute 100μg/kgi.p. injection of QUIN to all animals. Replicating previous work, neonatal QUIN enhanced yawning compared to controls, verifying D2 receptor supersensitization. Regarding PPI, neonatal QUIN resulted in deficits across both phases of testing persistent across all testing days. Probe trial results revealed that acute QUIN treatment resulted in more robust PPI deficits in neonatal QUIN animals, although this deficit was related to prepulse intensity and ISI. These findings provide evidence that neonatal QUIN treatment results in deficits of auditory sensorimotor gating in adulthood as measured through PPI.

Today many car manufactures are developing systems that help the driver to avoid collisions. Examples of this kind of systems are: adaptive cruise control, collision warning and collision mitigation / avoidance. All these systems need to track and predict future positions of surrounding objects (vehicles ahead of the system host vehicle), to calculate the risk of a future collision. To validate that a prediction is correct the predictions must be correlated to observations. This is called the data association problem. If a prediction can be correlated to an observation, this observation is used for updating the tracking filter. This process maintains the low uncertainty level for the track. From the work behind this thesis, it has been found that a sequential nearest- neighbour approach for the solution of the problem to correlate an observation to a prediction can be used to find the solution to the data association problem. Since the computational power for the collision mitigation system is limited, only the most dangerous surrounding objects can be tracked and predicted. Therefore, an algorithm that classifies and selects the most critical measurements is developed. The classification into order of potential risk can be done using the measurements that come from an observed object.

<p>Today many car manufactures are developing systems that help the driver to avoid collisions. Examples of this kind of systems are: adaptive cruise control, collision warning and collision mitigation / avoidance. </p><p>All these systems need to track and predict future positions of surrounding objects (vehicles ahead of the system host vehicle), to calculate the risk of a future collision. To validate that a prediction is correct the predictions must be correlated to observations. This is called the data association problem. If a prediction can be correlated to an observation, this observation is used for updating the tracking filter. This process maintains the low uncertainty level for the track. </p><p>From the work behind this thesis, it has been found that a sequential nearest- neighbour approach for the solution of the problem to correlate an observation to a prediction can be used to find the solution to the data association problem. </p><p>Since the computational power for the collision mitigation system is limited, only the most dangerous surrounding objects can be tracked and predicted. Therefore, an algorithm that classifies and selects the most critical measurements is developed. The classification into order of potential risk can be done using the measurements that come from an observed object.</p>

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2008. / Includes vita. Also available online. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-140).

Power supply noise has become a critical issue for low power and high performance circuit design in recent years. The rapid scaling of the CMOS process has pushed the limit further and further in building low-cost and increasingly complex digital VLSI systems. Continued technology scaling has contributed to significant improvements in performance, increases in transistor density, and reductions in power consumption. However, smaller feature sizes, higher operation frequencies, and supply voltage reduction make current and future VLSI systems more vulnerable to power supply noise. Therefore, there is a strong demand for strategies to prevent problems caused by power supply noise. Design challenges exist in different design phases to reduce power supply noise. In terms of physical design, careful power distribution design is required, since it directly determines the quality of power stability and the timing integrity. In addition, power management, such as switching mode of the power gating technique, is another major challenge during the circuit design phase. A bad power gating switching strategy may draw an excessive rush current and slow down other active circuitry. After the circuit is implemented, another critical design challenge is to estimate power supply noise. Designers need to be aware of the voltage drop in order to enhance the power distribution network without wasting unnecessary design resources. However, estimating power supply noise is usually difficult, especially finding the circuit activity which induces the maximum supply noise. Blind search may be very time consuming and not effective. At post-silicon test, detecting power supply noise within a chip is also challenging. The visibility of supply noise is low since there is no trivial method to measure it. However, the supply noise measurement result on silicon is critical to debug and to characterize the chip. This dissertation focuses on novel circuit designs and design methodologies to prevent problems resulted from power supply noise in different design phases. First, a supply noise estimation methodology is developed. This methodology systematically searches the circuit activity inducing the maximum voltage drop. Meanwhile, once the circuit activity is found, it is validated through instruction execution. Therefore, the estimated voltage drop is a realistic estimation close to the real phenomenon. Simulation results show that this technique is able to find the circuit activity more efficiently and effectively compared to random simulation. Second, two on-chip power supply noise detectors are designed to improve the visibility of voltage drop during test phase. The first detector facilitates insertion of numerous detectors when there is a need for additional test points, such as a fine-grained power gating design or a circuit with multiple power domains. It focuses on minimizing the area consumption of the existing detector. This detector significantly reduces the area consumption compared to the conventional approach without losing accuracy due to the area minimization. The major goal of designing the second on-chip detector is to achieve self-calibration under process and temperature variations. Simulation and silicon measurement results demonstrate the capability of self-calibration regardless these variations. Lastly, a robust power gating reactivation technique is designed. This reactivation scheme utilizes the on-chip detector presented in this dissertation to monitor power supply noise in real time. It takes a dynamic approach to control the wakeup sequence according to the ambient voltage level. Simulation results demonstrate the ability to prevent the excessive voltage drop while the ambient active circuitry induces a high voltage drop during the wakeup phase. As a result, the fixed design resource, which is used to prevent the voltage emergency, can potentially be reduced by utilizing the dynamic reactivation scheme. / text

To study transport properties in single InAs nanowires (NW) with etched constrictions, a bunch of back-gated single InAs NW devices were made. The standard device contained a NW section with an etched constriction, placed between two pre-patterned side-gates. For comparison, devices either without etched constriction or without side-gates were also fabricated. Transport measurement results of three devices were presented and discussed. The device without side-gates exhibited Coulomb blockade due to electron tunneling through double quantum dots (QDs). The device without the etched constriction displayed conductance quantization. The standard device showed both Coulomb blockade (due to electron tunneling through either multiple QDs or single QD) and Fabry-Perot conductance oscillation at different gate bias regime. A 3-D electrostatic and 2-D eigenvalue coupled simulation was conducted to explain the observed conductance quantization. This model suggests that the nonuniform potential distribution in a thick NW dramatically modifies the confinement energies in the NW.

To study transport properties in single InAs nanowires (NW) with etched constrictions, a bunch of back-gated single InAs NW devices were made. The standard device contained a NW section with an etched constriction, placed between two pre-patterned side-gates. For comparison, devices either without etched constriction or without side-gates were also fabricated. Transport measurement results of three devices were presented and discussed. The device without side-gates exhibited Coulomb blockade due to electron tunneling through double quantum dots (QDs). The device without the etched constriction displayed conductance quantization. The standard device showed both Coulomb blockade (due to electron tunneling through either multiple QDs or single QD) and Fabry-Perot conductance oscillation at different gate bias regime. A 3-D electrostatic and 2-D eigenvalue coupled simulation was conducted to explain the observed conductance quantization. This model suggests that the nonuniform potential distribution in a thick NW dramatically modifies the confinement energies in the NW.

ABSTRACT EVALUATION OF MULTI TARGET TRACKING ALGORITHMS IN THE PRESENCE OF CLUTTER G&uuml / ner, Onur M.S., Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mustafa Kuzuoglu August 2005, 88 Pages This thesis describes the theoretical bases, implementation and testing of a multi target tracking approach in radar applications. The main concern in this thesis is the evaluation of the performance of tracking algorithms in the presence of false alarms due to clutter. Multi target tracking algorithms are composed of three main parts: track initiation, data association and estimation. Two methods are proposed for track initiation in this work. First one is the track score function followed by a threshold comparison and the second one is the 2/2 &amp / M/N method which is based on the number of detections. For data association problem, several algorithms are developed according to the environment and number of tracks that are of interest. The simplest method for data association is the nearest-neighbor data association technique. In addition, the methods that use multiple hypotheses like probabilistic data association and joint probabilistic data association are introduced and investigated. Moreover, in the observation to track assignment, gating is an important issue since it reduces the complexity of the computations. Generally, ellipsoidal gates are used for this purpose. For estimation, Kalman filters are used for state prediction and measurement update. In filtering, target kinematics is an important point for the modeling. Therefore, Kalman filters based on different target kinematic models are run in parallel and the outputs of filters are combined to yield a single solution. This method is developed for maneuvering targets and is called interactive multiple modeling (IMM). All these algorithms are integrated to form a multi target tracker that works in the presence (or absence) of clutter. Track score function, joint probabilistic data association (JPDAF) and interactive multiple model filtering are used for this purpose. Keywords: clutter, false alarms, track initiation, data association, gating, target kinematics, IMM, JPDAF

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-144). Also available online.