The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to examine student-athlete perceptions of the role of summer pre-enrollment in their adjustment and transition to college. The study focused on student-athletes who received athletically-related financial aid at a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I-AAA institution. The Academic Progress Rate (APR), which measures academic eligibility and retention while incorporating a penalty structure for underperforming teams and athletic departments, has emerged as the fundamental measure of academic success for intercollegiate athletics programs. Educators have responded with a broad spectrum of support programs for student-athletes in order to meet APR benchmarks and avoid costly penalties. The NCAA first permitted the awarding of athletic aid to incoming student-athletes for summer pre-enrollment during the early part of the last decade. However, relatively little research has examined the concept of summer pre-enrollment and the role it may play in a student-athlete's adjustment and transition to college. The researcher conducted retrospective in-depth interviews with seven men's and women's basketball student-athletes who had completed one year of full-time enrollment at the selected institution and who received athletic aid for their summer pre-enrollment. Data was analyzed in a manner consistent with Boeije's Constant Comparative Analysis. This study drew upon Schlossberg's Transition Theory, and the participants described their experience in relation to their situation, self, support, and strategies. Collectively, the findings suggested that the participants perceived at least some benefit to their academic adjustment and social integration to college from the summer pre-enrollment. Though the summer pre-enrollment may not have provided identical academic, athletic, and social demands as the academic year, most of the participants indicated they were able to gain a better understanding of what college classes and college life were like as a result of their summer pre-enrollment participation. The findings further suggested that the participants were well prepared and well equipped for the demands of college prior to their summer pre-enrollment experience. Future research is needed to examine the role of summer pre-enrollment in the college adjustment and transition of student-athletes who are less prepared for the demands of college.

No description available.

No description available.

Today there exists two types of preventive surgical treatment procedures for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm. In order to make an informed choice of treatment, the clinician needs to have a clear picture of how the choice will affect the patients chances of survival. In this master thesis, machine learning techniques are used to predict survival probabilities after respective treatment procedure and the performance is compared to the more conventional Kaplan-Meier estimator.  Using Danish patient data, different machine learning models for survival predictions were trained and evaluated by their performance. Administrative Brier Score was used as performance metric as the data was administratively censored. An Ensemble model consisting of one Random Survival Forest and one Neural Multi Task Logistic Regression model was shown to achieve the best performance and significantly outperformed the conventional Kaplan-Meier model. Furthermore, an approach to investigate the predicted effects of choice of treatment was introduced. It showed that on average the Ensemble model predicted the choice of treatment to have less effect on the long term survival than what the corresponding prediction using the Kaplan-Meier estimator suggested. This applies to the full patient group as well as for patients of age between 70 and 79 years. In the latter case this prediction was also shown to be more accurate. / Idag finns det två typer av förebyggande kirurgiska behandlingsmetoder för abdominal aortaaneurysm. För att göra ett välgrundat val av behandlingsmetod måste läkaren ha en tydlig bild av hur valet kommer att påverka patienternas överlevadschanser. I detta examensarbete används maskininlärningstekniker för att förutsäga överlevnadssannolikheten efter respektive behandlingsmetod och prestandan jämförs mot den mer konventionella Kaplan-Meier-estimatorn. Med hjälp av dansk patientdata tränades olika maskininlärningsmodeller avsedda för överlevnadanalys och utvärderades utifrån deras prestanda. Administrativt Brier Score användes som mätvärde då censureringen i datan skett administrativt. En Ensemble-modell bestående av en Random Survival Forest- och en Neural Multi-Task Logistic Regression-modell visade sig uppnå bäst prestanda och överträffade signifikant den konventionella Kaplan-Meier-estimatorn.  Dessutom introducerades ett tillvägagångssätt för att undersöka de predikterade effekterna av valet av behandling. Resultaten visade att Ensemble-modellen i genomsnitt förutspådde valet av behandling att ha mindre effekt på den långsiktiga överlevnaden än vad motsvarande förutsägelse med Kaplan-Meier-estimatorn föreslog. Detta både för alla patienter såväl som för patienter i åldern mellan 70 och 79 år. I det senare fallet visade sig denna förutsägelse också vara mer träffsäker.

The pathological process behind abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) formation is poorly understood and difficult to study. The aim of the thesis was to study the pathophysiology of AAA formation with positron emission tomography (PET) technology, a molecular imaging technique, allowing in vivo studies of pathophysiological changes. In study I 18F-FDG, a glucose analogue, was tested. It had previously been reported as a useful tracer studying inflammation in AAAs. These studies included, however, foremost large, symptomatic, and inflammatory AAAs. In the present study on five small and seven large asymptomatic AAAs, no increase in 18F-FDG uptake could be revealed in vivo. In study II 11C-PK11195, a macrophage tracer, and 11C-D-deprenyl, an unspecific inflammatory tracer, previously never tested on asymptomatic AAAs, were tested in vivo on five and 10 AAA-patients respectively, without signs of increased levels of inflammatory activity in the aorta. In study III several tracers were screened in vitro through autoradiography on AAA tissue. [18F]fluciclatide, targeting the integrin αVβ3 receptor upregulated in angiogenesis, was the only tracer with an increased uptake. In study IV [18F]fluciclatide-autoradiography was performed on AAA tissue from five patients and non-aneurysmal aortic tissue obtained from five age and sex matched organ donors. The study showed a 56% increased specific uptake in AAA, although not significant (P=0.136). Immunohistochemical revealed inflammatory cell foci in close relation to the vessels. In conclusion, PET has potential to elucidate the pathophysiology of AAA formation. For the large group of small asymptomatic AAAs, 18F-FDG is not suitable, as the chronic inflammation in asymptomatic AAA is not sufficiently metabolically active. Furthermore, 11C-PK11195 and 11C-D-deprenyl were unable to show the chronic inflammation seen in asymptomatic AAA. The interesting finding with uptake of [18F]fluciclatide showed that angiogenesis may be imaged in large asymptomatic AAAs in vitro, through the integrin αVβ3 receptor. Thus, it is likely that future studies of the role of angiogenesis in AAA formation in vivo, in small AAAs, could use this target site. The development of an integrin αVβ3 receptor tracer, preferably with higher affinity, is in progress for further in vitro and in vivo studies.

The current clinical management of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease is based on measuring the aneurysm maximum diameter to decide when timely intervention can be recommended to a patient. However, other parameters may also play a role in causing or predisposing the AAA to either an early or delayed rupture relative to its size. Therefore, patient-specific assessment of rupture risk based on physical principles such as individualized biomechanics can be conducive to the development of a vascular tool with translational potential. To that end, the present doctoral research materialized into a framework for image based patient-specific vascular biomechanics assessment. A robust generalized approach is described herein for image-based volume mesh generation of complex multidomain bifurcated vascular trees with the capability of incorporating regionally varying wall thickness. The developed framework is assessed for geometrical accuracy, mesh quality, and optimal computational performance. The relative influence of the shape and the constitutive wall material property on the AAA wall mechanics was explored. This study resulted in statistically insignificant differences in peak wall stress among 28 AAA geometries of similar maximum diameter (in the 50 – 55 mm range) when modeled with five different hyperelastic isotropic constitutive equations. Relative influence of regionally varying vs. uniform wall thickness distribution on the AAA wall mechanics was also assessed to find statistically significant differences in spatial maxima of wall stresses, strains, and strain energy densities among the same 28 AAA geometries modeled with patient-specific non-uniform wall thickness and two uniform wall thickness assumptions. Finally, the feasibility of estimating in vivo wall strains from individual clinical images was evaluated. Such study resulted in a framework for in vivo 3D strain distributions based on ECG gated, unenhanced, dynamic magnetic resonance images acquired for 20 phases in the cardiac cycle. Future efforts should be focused on further development of the framework for in vivo estimation of regionally varying hyperelastic, anisotropic constitutive material models with active mechanics components and the integration of such framework with an open source finite element solver with the goal of increasing the translational potential of these tools for individualized prediction of AAA rupture risk in the clinic.

No description available.

No description available.

La diversité des standards actuels en compression d'images vise à la fois à proposer des schémas de codage efficaces et des fonctions de service adaptées à chaque type d'utilisation. Les travaux de cette thèse s'inscrivant dans ce contexte d'une telle compression, leur objectif majeur consiste en l'élaboration d'une méthode unifiée pour un codage avec et sans perte des images fixes et en séquences, intégrant des fonctionnalités avancées du type : scalabilité et représentation en régions hiérarchique, robustesse<br />aux erreurs. <br /><br />La méthode LAR (Locally Adaptive Resolution) de base a été élaborée à des fins de compression avec pertes à bas-débits. Par l'exploitation des propriétés intrinsèques du LAR, la définition d'une représentation en régions auto-extractibles apporte une solution de codage efficace à la fois en termes de débit et en termes de qualité d'images reconstruites. Le codage à débit localement variable est facilité par l'introduction de la notion de région d'intérêt ou encore de VOP (Video Object Plane).<br /><br />L'obtention d'un schéma de compression sans perte s'est effectuée conjointement à l'intégration de la notion de scalabilité, par l'intermédiaire de méthodes pyramidales. Associés à une phase de prédiction, trois codeurs différents répondant à ces exigences ont vu le jour : le LAR-APP, l'Interleaved S+P et le RWHT+P. Le LAR-APP (Approche Pyramidale Prédictive) se fonde sur l'exploitation d'un contexte de prédiction enrichi obtenu par un parcours original des niveaux de la pyramide construite. L'entropie des erreurs d'estimation résultantes (estimation réalisée dans le domaine spatial) s'avère ainsi réduite. Par la définition d'une solution opérant dans le domaine transformé, il nous a été possible d'améliorer plus encore les performances<br />entropiques du codeur scalable sans perte. L'Interleaved S+P se construit ainsi par l'entrelacement de deux pyramides de coefficients transformés. Quant à la méthode RWHT+P, elle s'appuie sur une forme nouvelle de la transformée Walsh-Hadamard bidimensionnelle. Les performances en termes d'entropie brute se révèlent bien supérieures à celles de l'état-de-l'art : des résultats tout à fait remarquables sont obtenus notamment sur les<br />images médicales.<br /><br />Par ailleurs, dans un contexte de télémédecine, par l'association des méthodes pyramidales du LAR et de la transformée Mojette, un codage conjoint source-canal efficace, destiné à la transmission sécurisée des images médicales compressées sur des réseaux bas-débits, a été défini. Cette technique offre une protection différenciée intégrant la nature hiérarchique des flux issus des méthodes multirésolution du LAR pour une qualité de service exécutée de bout-en-bout.<br /><br />Un autre travail de recherche abordé dans ce mémoire vise à l'implantation automatique des codeurs LAR sur des architectures parallèles hétérogènes multi-composants. Par le biais de la description des algorithmes sous le logiciel SynDEx, il nous a été possible en particulier de réaliser le prototypage de<br />l'Interleaved S+P sur des plate-formes multi-DSP et multi-PC.<br /><br />Enfin, l'extension du LAR à la vidéo fait ici l'objet d'un travail essentiellement prospectif. Trois techniques différentes sont proposées, s'appuyant sur un élément commun : l'exploitation de la représentation en régions précédemment évoquée.