Aim: This study aims to investigate the genetic components of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Reading Disability (RD), and their comorbidity. Methods: Three approaches were applied to data from 2610 Australian twin families. This data was obtained by parental completion of the ‘Twin and Sibling Questionnaire'. 1) Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was applied to generate genetically independent classes that defined ADHD subtypes and RD based on related cluster symptoms. 2) Genetic modelling was used to study the particular genetic and environmental effects of each ADHD subtype and of RD, and to examine whether children identified with comorbid ADHD-RD are a genetically distinct group from those who have only ADHD without RD. 3) A family-based genetic association, including haplotype block analysis, was applied to compare the efficacy of DSM-IV diagnostic criteria and LCA in the genotyping analysis, to test the genetic overlap of ADHD candidate genes on RD phenotypes.and vice versa, and to detect some of the risk alleles of ADHD alone, RD alone, and comorbid ADHD-RD. This analysis was performed on a data set that included 190 individuals from the original sample; it tested twenty-one Single Nucleotide Polyrnorphisms (SNPs) from five ADHD candidate genes (DRD4, DATI, SNAP25, COMT, and HTR1B), and four RD candidate genes (MRS2L, KIAA0319, TTRAP, and THEM2) from the 6p22.2 region. / Results: The LCA dissected the phenotypes for ADHD and RD into nine genetically informative classes. Univariate and bivariate results indicated the presence of unique genetic components on each ADHD subtype and RD category, and also showed the existence of genetic factors for comorbid ADHD-RD. The association findings, using continuous data represented by scores,of DSM-IV-defined ADHD and RD, showed two significant associations for ADHD and RD, whereas the association findings for the categorical data, represented by LCA, were richer as they showed 15 significant single-locus with ADHD and RD latent classes. Some of these association results were between ADHD candidate SNPs with RD latent classes and ADHD-RD comorbid classes. Some RD candidate SNPs were associated with ADHD latent classes and ADHD-RD comorbid classes. Haplotype block analysis detected a presence of one significant haplotype block containing two haplotype-tagging SNPs (ht-SNPs) of the COMT gene (rs4680 and rs165599), including three risk alleles ('AA', 'GC', and 'AC') that were associated with some phenotypic RD components. Conclusion: This study found that the use of ADHD-RD latent classes is more suitable for performing genetic association studies and haplotype block analysis than is DSM-IV- defined ADHD and RD definitions. Furthermore, there is an overlapping of genetic effect, as ADHD candidate genes contributed to RD phenotypes and vice versa. Thirdly, ADHD-RD comorbidity is caused by both ADHD and RD candidate genes.

Ce travail s’attache à répondre à deux préoccupations majeures : -déterminer le statut sociolinguistique du kindubile, parler des enfants de la rue de Lubumbashi appelés « shege ». -préciser les contextes de mobilisation du kindubile par les shege ainsi que les différentes significations qu’il revêt à leurs yeux. Il est basé sur un corpus très hétérogène: les données verbales (entretiens semi-directifs, libres, récits de vie, chansons et surnoms) et les matériaux picturaux (graffitis, tags et dessins) produits par les enfants eux-mêmes. Les analyses sont inspirées en linguistique par la pragmatique et en sociologie par l’interactionnisme symbolique, la théorie de l’acteur et du système ainsi que la théorie dispositionnaliste de Bernard Lahire. Cette dissertation a conduit aux résultats suivants : -le kindubile est un argot swahili. Sa grammaire est globalement identique à celle du kiswahili de Lubumbashi. La seule différence s’observe au niveau du lexique. Celui-ci, outre les procédés de création cryptique (adjonctions, suppressions, permutations et leur combinaison reste prolixe et focalisé sur certains registres seulement : la nourriture, l’argent, la débrouille, la violence et la sexualité. Ces domaines demeurent hautement significatifs à leur yeux d’autant plus qu’ils sont corrélés et indispensables à la vie de rue. -Les enfants de la rue recourent à l’argot pour communiquer entre eux, pour un repli identitaire (ils veulent s’affirmer comme un groupe particulier et en même temps être reconnus autant que respectés comme des personnes humaines à part entière). Ils recourent également au kindubile pour crypter leur message en parlant des stupéfiants, de la sexualité ou en voulant subtiliser un bien à quelqu’un). Ils emploient aussi le kindubile comme un espace de défoulement. En effet, ils expriment leur mécontentement de la société qui les a produits mais craignant les représailles, ils préfèrent s’exprimer en argot. Ils parlent aussi kindubile pour provoquer la peur chez leur interlocuteur lorsqu’ils le jugent nécessaire.

RD&E professionals will lead the direction of industries in Taiwan and also are the key factor of affecting business¡¦ survival in the future. This study explores the effects of RD&E professionals¡¦ work value, perfectionism, workaholism, and money ethic on professional commitment, pay satisfaction, and work performance. There are 1029 copies of valid samples obtained out of 2209 copies of bulk samples. The Pearson Correlation Analysis and the Blocked Regression Analysis are used to examine the hypotheses of this research and the findings of this study indicate that: 1. Work value, Perfectionism, Workaholism, and Money Ethic have a significant forecast ability on predicting dependent variables. 2. Work Value has a significant positive influence on the professional identification and involvement, the willingness to stay in the same profession, pay satisfaction, and work performance. 3. Personal Standards has a significant positive influence on the professional identification and involvement, the willingness to stay in the same profession, and work performance; Personal Standards has a significant negative influence on pay satisfaction. 4. Concern over Mistakes has a significant negative influence on the professional involvement, and work performance; Concern over Mistakes has a significant positive influence on the willingness to stay in the same profession. 5. Doubts about Actions has a significant negative influence on the willingness to stay in the same profession, and work performance; Doubts about Actions has a significant positive influence on the professional identification. 6. Parental Expectations has a significant positive influence on pay satisfaction. 7. Parental Criticism has a significant negative influence on the professional identification and involvement, and the willingness to stay in the same profession. 8. Non-Required Work has a significant positive influence on the professional identification and involvement, and work performance. 9. Control of Others has a significant positive influence on the professional identification and involvement, and work performance; Control of Others has a significant negative influence on the willingness to stay in the same profession. 10. Rich/Motivators has a significant negative influence on pay satisfaction, and work performance; Rich/Motivators has a significant positive influence on the professional involvement. 11. Making Money has a significant negative influence on the willingness to stay in the same profession; Making Money has a significant positive influence on the professional identification and involvement, and work performance. 12. Intrinsic Motivation has a significant positive influence on the professional identification, and pay satisfaction.

Total knee arthroplasty is a common elective orthopaedic procedure. The surgery itself causes soft tissue and bony trauma leading to a systemic response which includes endocrinological, immunological and haematological events. This thesis aims to investigate the potential association between total knee arthroplasty and such markers of inflammation, endothelium and coagulation. The study consisted of 4 groups; group 1 underwent an uncemented total knee arthroplasty; group 2 underwent a cemented total knee arthroplasty; group 3 underwent an uncemented total knee arthroplasty but received an intra-operative infiltration of local anaesthetic; group 4 underwent an uncemented total knee arthroplasty but had a post-operative drain for 24hours. Blood sampling was undertaken pre-operatively and at day 1 and day 7 post-operatively for the white cell count, platelets, neutrophils, C-reactive protein, interleukin 6, e-selectin, soluble CD40L, tissue plasminogen activator, von Willebrand factor, CD40 and CD1442a. Statistical analysis was undertaken in the form of pair sampled t-tests between group 1 and each of the other three groups. Although there some significant changes in one or two of the variables between the groups the only variable which demonstrated a significant difference in all comparisons was the CD1442a count. The exact role of CD1442a is unclear but there evidence to suggest that it may reflect the inflammatory and thrombotic process or contribute directly to the ongoing atherothrombogenesis. During the statistical analysis it was noted that the majority of the variables showed no clear statistical difference between the groups. In chapter 7 an ANOVA / Freidman analysis demonstrated that all but one of the variables, the CD1442a count, showed no statistical difference between all four groups. This allowed all the variables to be collated and presented as the single largest cohort study to date demonstrating the effects of total knee arthroplasty on the markers of inflammation, endothelium and coagulation. All the variables assessed showed a statistically significant change from pre-operative levels to day 7 post operation. 3 In summary our studies demonstrate that total knee arthroplasty results in activation of common markers of inflammation, endothelium and coagulation. These changes may explain the increased incidence of venous thrombosis and thrombo-embolism post-operatively as well as a potential risk of venous thrombo-embolism.

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In parallel with the developments in imaging modalities, image-guided surgery (IGS) can now provide the surgeon with high quality three-dimensional images depicting human anatomy. Although IGS is now in widely use in neurosurgery, there remain some limitations that must be overcome before it can be employed in more general minimally invasive procedures. In this thesis, we have developed several contributions to the field of medical image registration and brain tissue deformation modeling. From the methodology point of view, medical image registration algorithms can be classified into feature-based and intensity-based methods. One of the challenges faced by feature-based registration would be to determine which specific type of feature is desired for a given task and imaging type. For this reason, a point set registration using points and curves feature is proposed, which has the accuracy of registration based on points and the robustness of registration based on lines or curves. We have also tackled the problem on rigid registration of multimodal images using intensity-based similarity measures. Mutual information (MI) has emerged in recent years as a popular similarity metric and widely being recognized in the field of medical image registration. Unfortunately, it ignores the spatial information contained in the images such as edges and corners that might be useful in the image registration. We introduce a new similarity metric, called Adaptive Mutual Information (AMI) measure which incorporates the gradient spatial information. Salient pixels in the regions with high gradient value will contribute more in the estimation of mutual information of image pairs being registered. Experimental results showed that our proposed method improves registration accuracy and it is more robust to noise images which have large deviation from the reference image. Along with this direction, we further improve the technique to simultaneously use all information obtained from multiple features. Using multiple spatial features, the proposed algorithm is less sensitive to the effect of noise and some inherent variations, giving more accurate registration. Brain shift is a complex phenomenon and there are many different reasons causing brain deformation. We have investigated the pattern of brain deformation with respect to location and magnitude and to consider the implications of this pattern for correcting brain deformation in IGS systems. A computational finite element analysis was carried out to analyze the deformation and stress tensor experienced by the brain tissue during surgical operations. Finally, we have developed a prototype visualization display and navigation platform for interpretation of IGS. The system is based upon Qt (cross-platform GUI toolkit) and it integrates VTK (an object-oriented visualization library) as the rendering kernel. Based on the construction of a visualization software platform, we have laid a foundation on the future research to be extended to implement brain tissue deformation into the system.