Thesis--Wisconsin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-36).

No abstract available. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Medical Oncology / unrestricted

This thesis seeks to grasp how King Philip's War influenced cultural evolution in Massachusetts in order to determine whether it produced a culture of violence and conflict amongst the Anglo-Puritan inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay colony following the conflict. Specifically, this work uses primary sources produced by European inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay to examine the period between 1676 and 1713. Chapter II examines the impact of King Philip's War on the evolution of colonists' attitudes towards Indians by tracing the development of scalp bounties in Massachusetts. The use of scalp bounties highlights a trend towards commoditizing Indian lives in New England, and King Philip?s War proves critical in directing that trend. Chapter III explores the results of King Philip's War on the relationship between Massachusetts and the metropole in London. This chapter focuses on the riot of April, 1689, in Boston, that removed the London-appointed leader of the Dominion of New England, a political entity created, in part, in response to the weak showing of colonial government during King Philip's War. This chapter highlights the diverging views of empire and authority between the Massachusetts colonists and the royal officials in London. Chapter IV analyzes conflict and change within colonial Massachusetts society in the wake of King Philip's War. Here, I find that the war had the smallest impact on the overall course of subsequent cultural development in the colony. This does not mean that the war had no impact at all, but rather that such impact did not stand out against other patterns of cultural influence such as religion and economics.

Grammatical Evolution (GE) is a method of utilising a general purpose evolutionary algorithm to ???evolve??? programs written in an arbitrary BNF grammar. This thesis extends GE as follows: GE as an extension of Genetic Programming (GP) A novel method of automatically extracting information from the grammar is introduced. This additional information allows the use of GP style crossover which in turn allows GE to perform identically to a strongly typed GP system as well as a non-typed (or canonical) GP system. Two test problems are presented one which is more easily solved by the GP style crossover and one which favours the tradition GE ???Ripple Crossover???. With this new crossover operator GE can now emulate GP (as well as retaining its own unique features) and can therefore now be seen as an extension of GP. Dynamically Defined Functions An extension to the BNF grammar is presented which allows the use of dynamically defined functions (DDFs). DDFs provide an alternative to the traditional approach of Automatically Defined Functions (ADFs) but have the advantage that the number of functions and their parameters do not need to be specified by the user in advance. In addition DDFs allow the architecture of individuals to change dynamically throughout the course of the run without requiring the introduction of any new form of operator. Experimental results are presented confirming the effectiveness of DDFs. Self-Selecting (or variable) crossover. A self-selecting operator is introduced which allows the system to determine, during the course of the run, which crossover operator to apply; this is tested over several problem domains and (especially where small populations are used) is shown to be effective in aiding the system to overcome local optima. Spatial Co-Evolution in Age Layered Planes (SCALP) A method of combining Hornby???s ALPS metaheuristic and a spatial co-evolution system used by Mitchell is presented; the new SCALP system is tested over three problem domains of increasing difficulty and performs extremely well in each of them.

No / There is developing interest in the analytical use of human hair from archaeological contexts in key research areas such as DNA, trace elemental and isotopic analyses. Other human tissues, especially bone, that have been used for trace element, isotopic and DNA analyses have had extensive study concerning their diagenesis, but this has not been done for hair. Consideration must be given to the complex interaction of hair with its buried environment, thereby laying a firm basis for the use of hair in future research. Since human hair is known to survive under a diverse range of environmental conditions, a pilot study has investigated the basic processes of hair degradation, using samples from different climatic zones and burial types. Variation in the degree of preservation of archaeological hair was characterized by light microscopy, electron microscopy, and FT-Raman spectroscopy, relating morphological change of the surface and internal structure of hair to its biochemical integrity. The results demonstrate a breakdown of cortical cell boundaries and disruption of the cuticular layering, coupled with infiltration of material from the burial matrix that suggests a progressive loss of cohesion that is in part due to microbiological activity. Medullated hair is shown to be more susceptible to physical breakdown by providing two routes for microbial and environmental attack. At the molecular level the proteinaceous component undergoes alteration, and the S-S cystine linkages, responsible for the strength and resilience of hair in living individuals, are lost.

No / Cyclosporine A (CsA) has long been recognized as a potent hair growth stimulator in both humans and rodent. The induction of a dose-dependent hypertrichosis is one of the most frequent adverse effects of long-term CsA therapy (Lutz, 1994). However, it is unclear how this immunosuppressant induces hypertrichosis in patients or stimulates hair growth in human scalp skin transplanted on nude mice (Gilhar et al., 1988; Gilhar et al., 1991).

L’imagerie de source corticale joue un rôle important pour la compréhension fonctionnelle ou pathologique du cerveau. Elle permet d'estimer l'activation de certaines zones corticales en réponse à un stimulus cognitif donné et elle est également utile pour identifier la localisation des activités pathologiques, qui sont les premières étapes de l'étude des activations de réseaux neuronaux sous-jacents. Diverses méthodes d'investigation clinique peuvent être utilisées, des modalités d'imagerie (TEP, IRM) et magnéto-électroencéphalographie (EEG, SEEG, MEG). Nous souhaitions résoudre le problème à partir de données non invasives : les mesures de l'EEG de scalp, elle procure une résolution temporelle à la hauteur des processus étudiés Cependant, la localisation des sources activées à partir d'enregistrements EEG reste une tâche extrêmement difficile en raison de la faible résolution spatiale. Pour ces raisons, nous avons restreint les objectifs de cette thèse à la reconstruction de cartes d’activation des sources corticales de surface. Différentes approches ont été explorées. Les méthodes les plus simples d'imagerie corticales sont basées uniquement sur les caractéristiques géométriques de la tête. La charge de calcul est considérablement réduite et les modèles utilisés sont faciles à mettre en œuvre. Toutefois, ces approches ne fournissent pas d'informations précises sur les générateurs neuronaux et sur leurs propriétés spatiotemporelles. Pour surmonter ces limitations, des techniques plus sophistiquées peuvent être utilisées pour construire un modèle de propagation réaliste, et donc d'atteindre une meilleure reconstruction de sources. Cependant, le problème inverse est sévèrement mal posé, et les contraintes doivent être imposées pour réduire l'espace des solutions. En l'absence de modèle bioanatomique, les méthodes développées sont fondées sur des considérations géométriques de la tête ainsi que la propagation physiologique des sources. Les opérateurs matriciels de rang plein sont appliqués sur les données, de manière similaire à celle effectuée par les méthodes de surface laplacien, et sont basés sur l'hypothèse que les données de surface peuvent être expliquées par un mélange de fonctions de bases radiales linéaires produites par les sources sous-jacentes. Dans la deuxième partie de ces travaux, nous détendons la contrainte-de rang plein en adoptant un modèle de dipôles distribués sur la surface corticale. L'inversion est alors contrainte par une hypothèse de parcimonie, basée sur l'hypothèse physiologique que seuls quelques sources corticales sont simultanément actives ce qui est particulièrement valable dans le contexte des sources d'épilepsie ou dans le cas de tâches cognitives. Pour appliquer cette régularisation, nous considérons simultanément les deux domaines spatiaux et temporels. Nous proposons deux dictionnaires combinés d’atomes spatio-temporels, le premier basé sur une analyse en composantes principales des données, la seconde à l'aide d'une décomposition en ondelettes, plus robuste vis-à-vis du bruit et bien adaptée à la nature non-stationnaire de ces données électrophysiologiques. Toutes les méthodes proposées ont été testées sur des données simulées et comparées aux approches classiques de la littérature. Les performances obtenues sont satisfaisantes et montrent une bonne robustesse vis-à-vis du bruit. Nous avons également validé notre approche sur des données réelles telles que des pointes intercritiques de patients épileptiques expertisées par les neurologues de l'hôpital universitaire de Nancy affiliées au projet. Les localisations estimées sont validées par l'identification de la zone épileptogène obtenue par l'exploration intracérébrale à partir de mesures stéréo EEG. / Cortical Source Imaging plays an important role for understanding the functional and pathological brain mechanisms. It links the activation of certain cortical areas in response to a given cognitive stimulus, and allows one to study the co-activation of the underlying functional networks. Among the available acquisition modality, electroencephalographic measurements (EEG) have the great advantage of providing a time resolution of the order of the millisecond, at the scale of the dynamic of the studied process, while being a non-invasive technique often used in clinical routine. However the identification of the activated sources from EEG recordings remains an extremely difficult task because of the low spatial resolution this modality provides, of the strong filtering effect of the cranial bones and errors inherent to the used propagation model. In this work different approaches for the estimation of cortical activity from surface EEG have been explored. The simplest cortical imaging methods are based only on the geometrical characteristics of the head. The computational load is greatly reduced and the used models are easy to implement. However, such approaches do not provide accurate information about the neural generators and on their spatiotemporal properties. To overcome such limitations, more sophisticated techniques can be used to build a realistic propagation model, and thus to reach better source reconstruction by its inversion. However, such inversion problem is severely ill-posed, and constraints have to be imposed to reduce the solution space. We began by reconsidering the cortical source imaging problem by relying mostly on the observations provided by the EEG measurements, when no anatomical modeling is available. The developed methods are based on simple but universal considerations about the head geometry as well as the physiological propagation of the sources. Full-rank matrix operators are applied on the data, similarly as done by Surface Laplacian methods, and are based on the assumption that the surface can be explained by a mixture of linear radial basis functions produced by the underlying sources. In the second part of the thesis, we relax the full-rank constraint by adopting a distributed dipole model constellating the cortical surface. The inversion is constrained by an hypothesis of sparsity, based on the physiological assumption that only a few cortical sources are active simultaneously Such hypothesis is particularly valid in the context of epileptic sources or in the case of cognitive tasks. To apply this regularization, we consider simultaneously both spatial and temporal domains. We propose two combined dictionaries of spatio-temporal atoms, the first based on a principal components analysis of the data, the second using a wavelet decomposition, more robust to noise and well suited to the non-stationary nature of these electrophysiological data. All of the proposed methods have been tested on simulated data and compared to conventional approaches of the literature. The obtained performances are satisfactory and show good robustness to the addition of noise. We have also validated our approach on real epileptic data provided by neurologists of the University Hospital of Nancy affiliated to the project. The estimated locations are consistent with the epileptogenic zone identification obtained by intracerebral exploration based on Stereo-EEG measurements.

.

AL’objectif de la thèse est le développement d’une méthode de caractérisation des crises d’épilepsie du lobe temporal à partir des EEG de surface et plus particulièrement de la zone épileptogène (ZE) à l’origine des crises. Des travaux récents ont démontré une évolution des synchronisations entre structures cérébrales permettant une caractérisation de la dynamique des crises du lobe temporal. La comparaison de différentes méthodes de mesure de relation a permis la mise en évidence des avantages du coefficient de corrélation non-linéaire dans l’étude de l’épilepsie par les EEG de surface. L’exploitation de l’évolution de ce coefficient est à la base de trois applications de traitement automatique du signal EEG : -détermination de la latéralisation de la ZE au départ d’une crise, -recherche d’une signature épileptique, -classification des crises du lobe temporal en deux groupes / The objective of this work was the development of a temporal lobe epilepsy seizures characterization methodology realized through scalp EEG analysis. Recent researches showed an evolution of the synchronizations between cerebral structures, allowing a characterization of dynamic of the seizures. The comparison, between different methods of relation measurement, proved the advantages of the non-linear correlation coefficient in the study of epileptic seizures from scalp EEGs. The characterization of the evolution of this coefficient was used as the base of the development of three signal processing applications : -determination of the side of the Epileptic Zone at the onset of a seizure -research of an epileptic pattern at the seizure onset -classification of the temporal lobe seizures into two groups.

No description available.