Zugl.: Dresden, Techn. Univ., Diplomarbeit / Hergestellt on demand

Freie Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Berlin. / Dateiformat: zip, Dateien im PDF-Format.

PURPOSE: Ischemic retinopathies such as diabetic retinopathy (DR), retinal vein occlusions (RVO), and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are ocular diseases caused by abnormal changes in the microvasculature that results in ischemia. This is often followed by a secondary phase characterized by pathological neovascularization and leakage of fluid, which contributes to a loss of visual acuity in affected patients. Anti-VEGF therapy, the current standard of treatment for ischemic retinopathies, is invasive, costly, and lacks a known treatment period. Supplemental oxygen provides the therapeutic potential of not only oxygenating hypoxic retinal cells, but also reducing the neovascularization and edema associated with many ischemic retinopathies through the downregulation of proangiogenic and pro-inflammatory cytokines.The objective of this study is to understand the biochemical underpinnings of treating ischemic retinopathies with hyperoxia. The elucidation of the effect hyperoxia on the molecular level may help guide the development of future studies regarding this novel treatment. METHODS: 68 undiluted vitreous samples were obtained during pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) and the concentration analysis of 34 proteins was analyzed using the Bio-Plex Pro Human Cancer Biomarker Assay. Vitreous samples were divided into three groups: (1) eyes of patients who underwent PPV for epiretinal membrane peeling (ERMP) and/or macular hole (MH) with no history of diabetes mellitus (non-DM group); (2) eyes of patients who underwent PPV for ERMP and/or MH with a history of diabetes or nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (DM group); (3) eyes of patients who underwent PPV for proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR group). Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to compare the biomarker concentrations between the three groups. RESULTS: Numerous growth factors and inflammatory cytokines were significantly upregulated between the non-DM and PDR groups - Angiopoietin-2, EGF, Endoglin, G-CSF, HB-EGF, HGF, PDGF, PIGF, sHER2/neu, TIE-2, VEGF-A, VEGF-D, IL-18, IL-6, IL-8, PECAM-1, sCD40L, SCF, sFASL, sIL-6Ra, TNF-⍺, Leptin, PAI-1, and uPA. A literature search of these proteins revealed many to be directly activated by HIF-1 transcription factor, which is the "master switch" for genes transcribed during a hypoxic event. CONCLUSION: The abundance of proangiogenic and pro-inflammatory factors in PDR that are also upregulated by HIF-1 demonstrate the potential for using hypoxia to treat PDR (and other ischemic retinopathies) through the reduction of HIF-1. This study also shows the wide variability in the expression levels of these proteins which helps provide a better understanding of their degree of involvement in the pathogenesis of ischemic retinopathies. / 2021-06-14T00:00:00Z

Product development is continually becoming more challenging as global competition requires more efficient design methods. The reuse of company knowledge, specifically the design rationale that occurs during projects is essential to success. This thesis presents a method for integrating engineering and communication tools for purposes of automating the capture of communication-based design rationale. The method is based on four basic principles: to integrate, to make data retrievable, to minimize user interaction, and to store as much DR as possible. The core method consists of two primary operations, the first being to capture the design rationale, and the second being to provide for effective retrieval. An implementation of this method that uses NX as the engineering tool and Skype VoIP software as the communication tool was created for the purpose of testing integration as a means of DR capture. The implementation was evaluated using four separate tests, which focus on efficiency of capture and retrieval, cost analysis, and user satisfaction. These results show that the tool provides improvement in each of the tested categories. From this testing I conclude that integrating communication and engineering tools is an excellent way to capture communication-based design rationale. The tool presented is more efficient than traditional methods in the test cases and provides a user-friendly solution to DR capture. This tool also has various other important applications, such as global collaboration and expectation management. It also provides an excellent framework for upcoming multi-user CAx tools.

<p> It is a sad reality but there are more churches every year that find it increasingly difficult to maintain the ministry effectiveness that they employed in years gone by. These struggling congregations face the option of closing their doors, partnering with another church or agency, or merging with another church with the hopes of continuing a ministry presence in their community.</p> <p> The merging or amalgamation of churches has been an increasingly popular option that many congregations are exploring but amalgamations are hard work and can be doomed to failure if the congregations involved do not discover the underlying theological reason why their churches failed in the first place. Churches fail when they stop being engaged in the missio Dei. The missio Dei is God's mission in the world to establish his Kingdom "on earth as it is in heaven." The church is a community of people in mission for God.</p> <p> Churches that are interested in amalgamation should consider following a model, like the one presented in this thesis, which focuses on understanding and fulfilling the mission of God within their context.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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One of the main reasons why developers investigate code history is to search for the rationale for code commits. Existing work found that developers report that rationale is one of the most important aspects to understand code changes and that it can be quite difficult to find. While this finding strongly points out the fact that understanding the rationale for code commits is a serious problem for software engineers, no current research efforts have pursued understanding in detail what specifically developers are searching for when they search for rationale. In other words, while the rationale for code commits is informally defined as, "Why was this code implemented this way?" this question could refer to aspects of the code as disparate as, "Why was it necessary to implement this code?"; "Why is this the way in which it was implemented?"; or "Why was the code implemented at that moment?" Our goal with this study is to improve our understanding of what software developers mean when they talk about the rationale for code commits, i.e., how they "unfold" rationale. We additionally study which components of rationale developers find important, which ones they normally need to find, which ones they consider specifically difficult to find, and which ones they normally record in their own code commits. This new, detailed understanding of the components of the rationale for code commits may serve as inspiration for novel techniques to support developers in seeking and accurately recording rationale. / MS

[pt] Este trabalho apresenta um modelo de representação de conhecimento e a arquitetura conceitual de um ambiente de design integrado para apoiar a representação de design rationale e seu uso no design de artefatos de software. Em nossa abordagem de representação propomos o uso da semântica formal dos artefatos, fornecida pelos métodos de design, para representar design rationale usando o vocabulário definido na ontologia Kuaba. Este vocabulário, descrito em uma linguagem formal para especificação de ontologias, permite definir um conjunto de regras e operações computáveis que apóiam o reuso de designs na produção de novos artefatos de software. Esta abordagem de representação possibilita um novo tipo de reuso de design de software em um nível mais alto de abstração, onde rationales podem ser integrados e re- empregados no design de um novo artefato. / [en] This work presents a knowledge representation model and the conceptual architecture of an integrated design environment to support recording design rationale, as well as use of design rationale, during design of software artifacts. In our representation approach, we propose the use of the formal semantics of artifacts provided by design methods to represent design rationale using the vocabulary defined in the Kuaba ontology. This vocabulary described in a formal ontologies specification language allows defining a set of rules and computable operations that support the reuse of designs in the production of new software artifacts. This representation approach enables a type of software design reuse at the highest abstraction level, where rationales can be integrated and re-employed in designing a new artifact.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-23T14:33:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alex Pinheiro das Gracas.pdf: 2761846 bytes, checksum: a904945394b1c705b72df3268f5bdab8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-08-27 / The adoption of ontologically well founded languages for building ontologies has acquiring more adopters, however its widespread use stumble on using difficulties by inexperienced modelers. This dissertation proposes a methodological guide to support the building of domain ontologies using the ontologically well founded language OntoUML. This guide through the analysis of language structure, restrictions and design patterns helps the designer on the modeling process. Beyond, the building support interactions are used to generate a design rationale. At last, it is presented a Web application implementing the ideas proposed in this work / A adoção de linguagens ontologicamente bem fundamentadas para construção de ontologias, apesar de vir ganhando mais adeptos, esbarra nas dificuldades da utilização desta linguagem por modeladores inexperientes. Este trabalho propõe um guia metodológico para apoiar as construções de ontologias utilizando a linguagem OntoUML Este guia auxilia o projetista no processo de modelagem através do estudo da estrutura da linguagem, suas restrições sintáticas e padrões de projetos. Além disso, as interações com o modelador na utilização deste guia são utilizadas para gerar um design rationale do processo de modelagem. Por final é apresentada uma implementação Web de uma ferramenta que demonstra as propostas apresentadas neste trabalho