Thesis (M.A. Sc.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 3197.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Hodges, Dewey H.; Committee Member: Bauchau, Olivier A.; Committee Member: Johnson, Ellis; Committee Member: Makeev, Andrew; Committee Member: Volovoi, Vitali V.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-67).

Currently, there is a dearth of knowledge regarding pediatric Complex Regional pain syndrome (CRPS), whether it is in regards to its pathophysiological mechanisms, pediatric-specific diagnostic criteria, validated diagnostic tests, conclusive treatment regimens, or validation of invasive and noninvasive treatment protocols in the pediatric CRPS population. It is imperative to first explore and establish a pediatric CRPS diagnostic criteria in order to optimize diagnostic accuracy for clinical and research purposes. This study first examined the efficacy of the Budapest criteria, a validated diagnostic instrument for adult CRPS, in the pediatric population. The test was administered to 221 pediatric patients at the Pediatric Pain Rehabilitation Center (PPRC), an intensive day treatment program at Boston Children’s Hospital for youth with chronic pain, and included both CRPS and non-CRPS chronic pain patients. Utilizing the Budapest criteria, secondary analyses were performed to determine whether the pediatric CRPS patients had an alleviation of their diagnosis from admission to discharge from the program. The Budapest clinical decision rule (to satisfy at least 2 signs categories and 3 symptoms categories) was utilized in examining the data. The sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), and negative likelihood ratio (NLR) of the Budapest criteria in the pediatric sample were 0.56, 0.95, 10.39, and 0.47, respectively. The low sensitivity and high specificity was in contrast to the adult findings, and suggests that the Budapest criteria would be appropriate when the primary purpose is to identify stringent research samples as opposed to maximizing clinical diagnoses of CRPS. The likelihood ratios indicated that while satisfying the Budapest clinical decision rule may conclusively increase the probability of the pediatric patient actually having CRPS, a negative test does not significantly decrease the probability of the patient having CRPS. Therefore, modifications that appropriately increase the sensitivity while maintaining the high specificity of the Budapest Criteria are recommended. Repeated measures ANOVA resulted in a significant decrease of the Budapest signs and symptoms score in the 94 pediatric CRPS patients in the sample, both in the Clinician + Budapest (satisfied the Budapest clinical decision rule) and Clinician Diagnosed (did not satisfy the Budapest clinical decision rule) CRPS cohorts (p < 0.001). This further authenticated the use of a multidisciplinary treatment approach in managing pediatric CRPS, as the program was successful in alleviating the patients’ signs and symptoms. Further research must be conducted to explore the improvements that can be made to the Budapest Criteria for its use in pediatric CRPS so as to maximize its diagnostic accuracy. Overall, this study corroborated the use of interdisciplinary treatment regimens for pediatric CRPS, but further rigorous investigation is necessary to elucidate the mechanisms behind pediatric CRPS and the rehabilitation programs’ success in managing CRPS.

The Kattegat sea region between Denmark and Sweden is identified as a region both economically and environmentally sensitive. Statistics indicate that over two thousand vessels per day navigate in the region. Navigation route optimization for the region is vital for efficient transportation. Optimized routes allow a vessel to carry the maximum amount of goods per course leading to efficient fuel consumption, which can greatly benefit in an economical and environmental aspect. Such optimization requires a highly accurate and reliable vertical reference surface for efficient transportation. In the Baltic Sea and Kattegat, a geoid is now used as such a surface. For geoid modelling, homogenous and reliable gravity measurements are required over a larger area surrounding the computation point. The Kattegat region consists of gravity data mainly from the Swedish Fyrbyggaren marine campaign 2019, Kattegat airborne campaign 2018 and several older datasets from the Nordic Geodetic Commission (NKG) database. These gravity data over Kattegat region have been measured using different instruments in various time epochs that inherit them with uncertainties depending on the platform type, instrument sensor type, filter type, corrections applied, processing software and many other parameters. In this study, the data uncertainty of gravity measurements from various sensors in the Kattegat region was studied through statistical and graphical evaluations. It was found out that the data from Kattegat airborne campaign 2018 deviate systematically with from the more reliable Fyrbyggaren marine campaign 2019 and other marine datasets. The airborne campaign was therefore tentatively corrected by the estimated shift +1.46 mGal before further analysis was made of the other datasets. It is found that NKG publication numbers 29, 42, 44, 610, 611 and 616 from the NKG gravity database have a standard uncertainty of around 2-3 mGal. Which is within the range of allowable uncertainty for future applications. These datasets may thus positively contribute to NKG database along with data from the Swedish Fyrbyggaren marine campaign 2019 and the shifted Kattegat airborne campaign 2018. These datasets should be used to model the geoid over the region in the future.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / When the child welfare system becomes involved with a family in need of services it does so with the goal of concluding its involvement by finding a safe and permanent placement for the children, ideally with their parents. This challenging and complicated work often has many issues that need to be addressed before a successful closure can occur. To achieve this goal, multiple service providers with various backgrounds, degrees, and professions are tasked with working with each other and the family through a collaborative team called a multidisciplinary team (MDT). However, collaboration is not always guaranteed, and conflict can emerge as the team attempts to best serve the family. This conflict may emerge among professionals and between professionals and the family. Although the underlying factors of collaboration and conflict have been documented and studied, research on the process of resolving conflict when it occurs in MDTs is severely lacking in the literature. Furthermore, MDTs specific to the child welfare system also lack the focus they deserve within the child welfare literature. This grounded theory study addresses the gap by focusing on child welfare MDTs and specifically on home-based therapists (N=20) to determine not only their perceptions of facilitators and barriers to collaboration but also the process that they and their fellow service providers engage in when addressing and resolving conflict. In conducting this qualitative study, this researcher used grounded theory to construct a theory outlining the processes that home-based therapists utilize to resolve conflict within MDTs, starting with the emergence of the conflict and detailing the decision making process through the team’s reaction and the ultimate decision or final result. In the future, these findings could be used to aid and train other MDT members as they face their own conflicts with the hope that a more efficient conflict resolution process will lead to a more effective MDT that keeps its focus on the family and provides the needed treatment and services in a timely manner.

No description available.

Orthodontic treatment in the adult is not new. Until lately, the challenges of treating the adult patient kept their numbers low. Over the last thirty years, however, there has been a steady increase in the prevalence of adults seeking orthodontic treatment. Many adults present with a mutilated dentition that often require a multidisciplinary approach for optimal treatment outcomes. Currently, guidelines for the evaluation of adult orthodontic treatment outcomes do not exist. The purpose of this study was to determine which factors are considered most important for the evaluation of the quality of adult orthodontic treatment outcome of patients with a mutilated dentition by practicing orthodontists, periodontists, and restorative dentists. In this study, orthodontists, periodontists, and restorative dentists examined the records of ten adult patients in the mutilated dentition who received orthodontic treatment at Temple University in the Department of Orthodontics. This study was approached from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Two surveys were used to collect the data. One survey used a visual analogue scale to measure the overall result, occlusion, buccal bone height, periodontal health, restorability, case difficulty, and the amount of influence of the American Board of Orthodontics (ABO) standards when judging the cases. A second survey was used to determine if the examiner was ABO certified and asked a series of open-ended questions related to orthodontic treatment outcome. Based on the data collected, the following conclusions were drawn: 1. Orthodontists, periodontists, and restorative dentists are consistent in their rating of orthodontic treatment outcome. 2. Periodontists and restorative dentists rate overall case finish and posttreatment occlusion higher than orthodontists. 3. When evaluating case finish, orthodontists tend to blend what is optimal as described by the guidelines of the American Board of Orthodontics with what is reasonably achievable for the patient. 4. Orthodontists, periodontists, and restorative dentists rate the following five factors to be most important when evaluating orthodontic treatment outcome: esthetics, occlusion, restorability, periodontal health, and stability. 5. Orthodontists, periodontists, and restorative dentists rate esthetics as the most important factor to use for evaluating orthodontic treatment outcome. The data suggest that adult patients with mutilated dentitions can pursue orthodontic treatment and achieve an excellent result. Teamwork among all dental specialists providing treatment is essential for multidisciplinary treatment. Treatment goals among all providers must be aligned to reach the ultimate treatment goals. / Oral Biology

Modern aerospace vehicle design requires the interaction of multiple disciplines, traditionally processed in a sequential order. Multidisciplinary optimization (MDO), a formal methodology for the integration of these disciplines, is evolving toward methods capable of replacing the traditional sequential methodology of aerospace vehicle design by concurrent algorithms, with both an overall gain in product performance and a decrease in design time. A parallel MDO paradigm using variable-complexity modeling and multipoint response surface approximations is presented here for the particular instance of the design of a high speed civil transport (HSCT). This paradigm interleaves the disciplines at one level of complexity, and processes them hierarchically at another level of complexity, achieving parallelism within disciplines, rather than across disciplines. A master-slave paradigm manages a coarse grained parallelism of the analysis and optimization codes required by the disciplines showing reasonable speedups and efficiencies on an Intel Paragon / Master of Science

Architecture both as a field of knowledge and profession had always been an outcome of multidisciplinary collaboration. The limits of this collaboration are directly effective on both the method of design and the end product itself. In contemporary modern architecture, this interaction between architecture and other disciplines reached to an altered mode where design strategies became open to transformations and the traditional understanding of design replaced with alternative approaches. This thesis aims to understand the limits of multidisciplinary collaboration and altered mode of design under the contemporary context. Architectural design competitions will be a major case study area towards understanding disciplinary transparencies and their impact on design process. Under this framework the study questions the limits of continuity between architecture and other disciplines as transformative power of each other.