To improve efficacy in the field of drug discovery simpler in vivo, non invasive methods such as PET and SPECT are used. Pharmacokinetic analysis is the underlying method for analyzing the PET data. Imaging of tracer distribution is used to study a metabolic process. Using Matlab as the programming language, a software tool is developed to analyze the quantitative information from PET and to obtain an estimate of pharmacokinetic parameters, representing the bio- distribution of the radiotracer. A Graphical User Interface developed allows two types of analysis, depending upon the nature of the radiotracer: Compartmental Modeling and Logan Plot Analysis. Compartmental analysis gives us rate constants and blood volume where as Logan analysis gives us the distribution volume as the parameter of interest. Code validation is done for two radiotracers, 15O-water (Single compartment model) and FPAC (Logan Plot). Results from the code were compared with those obtained during a research work done to study MDR.

This diploma thesis deals with global illumination and generally with the process of illumination of prepared scenes. A program for illumination management was written for this purpose. It can manage both direct and indirect illumination in interactive time. Simple and comfortable user interface allows for addition, deletion and change in light settings. Different types of both point and area lights are supported. In the course of all work, the program displays current illumination of the scene. With the help of this application, a series of different experiments will be carried out. We will explore the way users work during illumination, the way they perceive different properties of global illumination, various options of its control and its comparison with common direct illumination.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / A Health Care System is targeted to provide well-monitored patient care. ‘A Visualization Framework for Patient data and its environment’ offers a broad portfolio of patient monitoring to help and improve patient care. ‘A Visualization Framework for Patient data and its environment’ is an application to monitor and analyze any patient’s activity visually through a period of time in conjunction with the surroundings aspects like the room temperature, status of lights in the room, etc. in a healthcare system. A set of sensors equipped with each patient record data, pertaining to the patient’s movement and location in addition to a few other sensor values like temperature and light sensors for recording the room temperature, status of lights in the room respectively. On accepting the activity time bounds as the input, the application retrieves the appropriate values from the database and displays the patient position as a continuous stream of images in association with a slider along with the temperature values. A floor map of the hospital, similar to a blueprint model, is portrayed along with graphical display of lights, in conjunction with the slider. The patient locations are depicted on the map by minute icons with a patient id associated with the each of the icons for identification purposes. Individual window frames for each patient, displaying a patient’s position, enable the user to customize monitoring to specific patients at any instance of time and thus keep track of every move of the patient over a considerate period of time. The locations of the patients on the map, the lights in the rooms depicted on the floor map, the patient position in the individual windows and the temperature are all in synchronization with the slider whose movement is a function of time. The application allows monitoring of values that correspond closely to real-time data values thus maximizing the scope of improvements in the patient’s progress. The application is implemented on a Java Platform using Swings and is expected to handle considerable amounts of data up to two days.

Master of Science / Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering / Steve Warren / Activity recognition can be an important part of human health awareness. Many benefits can be generated from the recognition results, including knowledge of activity intensity as it relates to wellness over time. Various activity-recognition techniques have been presented in the literature, though most address simple activity-data collection and off-line analysis. More sophisticated real-time identification is less often addressed. Therefore, it is promising to consider the combination of current off-line, activity-detection methods with wearable, embedded tools in order to create a real-time wireless human activity recognition system with improved accuracy. Different from previous work on activity recognition, the goal of this effort is to focus on specific activities that an astronaut may encounter during a mission. Planetary navigation field test (PNFT) tasks are designed to meet this need. The approach used by the KSU team is to pre-record data on the ground in normal earth gravity and seek signal features that can be used to identify, and even predict, fatigue associated with these activities. The eventual goal is to then assess/predict the condition of an astronaut in a reduced-gravity environment using these predetermined rules. Several classic machine learning algorithms, including the k-Nearest Neighbor, Naïve Bayes, C4.5 Decision Tree, and Support Vector Machine approaches, were applied to these data to identify recognition algorithms suitable for real-time application. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were designed for both MATLAB and LabVIEW environments to facilitate recording and data analysis. Training data for the machine learning algorithms were recorded while subjects performed each activity, and then these identification approaches were applied to new data sets with an identification accuracy of around 86%. Early results indicate that a single three-axis accelerometer is sufficient to identify the occurrence of a given PNFT activity. A custom, embedded acceleration monitoring system employing ZigBee transmission is under development for future real-time activity recognition studies. A different GUI has been implemented for this system, which uses an on-line algorithm that will seek to identify activity at a refresh rate of 1 Hz.

The main theme of this dissertation is to develop a distributed computational pipeline for processing next-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data. RNA-seq experiments generate hundreds of millions of short reads for each DNA/RNA sample. There are many existing bioinformatics tools developed for the analysis and visualization of this data, but very large studies present computational and organizational challenges that are difficult to overcome manually. We designed a comprehensive pipeline for the analysis of RNA sequencing which leverages many existing tools and parallel computing technology to facilitate the analysis of extremely large studies. RNA CoMPASS provides a web-based graphical user interface and distributed computational pipeline including endogenous transcriptome quantification and additionally the investigation of exogenous sequences.

RSAT (Reticulation Sag And Tension) software is a tool available for use as part of the medium voltage Eskom Distribution standard. This software is scrutinised for its usability and for errors such that it can be revised to improve the usability of the tool. The type of software being studied is used to ensure optimum design performance and reduce the probability of a conductor failure on distribution lines. The algorithms for calculating tension, sag and clearance values take into account research into optimum design tensions. This ensures low bending forces due to conductor vibration. An algorithm for creep is designed based on common life expectancy of line conductors. The design methodology and algorithms were then put into software form as RSAT. Review and alterations include the changing of compiler, user interface, data storage mechanisms and the inclusion of options allowing the addition of new data.

The evolution of Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), has made an essential impact on patient-centered symptom management. PROs enable us to measure the patient‘s feels about their symptoms during treatment. ePROs (electronic PROs) are interfaces that allow a patient or health care provider to manage symptoms using an application such as mobile computing applications. The growth of mobile technologies in the healthcare sector has enabled us to take advantage of features like data manipulation, portability and standardization enable a better patient-driven symptom management. The Pan-Canadian Oncology Symptom Triage and Remote Support (COSTaRS) is a paper-based symptom management guideline designated for nurses. The objective of COSTaRS is to help and improve the decision-making process and create a consistent symptom management reporting system. Although this tool introduces numerous advantages in cancer symptom management, it also induces a number of issues for patients due to being overwhelming. Moreover, a noticeable portion of drawbacks originates from the paper-based nature of COSTaRS. In addition, cancer care symptom management mobile applications do not offer proper evidence-based centered symptom management system to the users. The purpose of this study is to design and developed the mobile version of COSTaRS for patients and caregivers. We identify problems with the current paper-based structure and related academic and non-academic works and then, we design and evaluate a mobile version of COSTaRS that takes advantage of advances in mobile technology. We leverage COSTaRS knowledge to create a mobile application for symptom management. We create an evidence-based platform for cancer treatment-related symptom management. A usability testing has been conducted for evaluation of the COSTaRS mobile application. The results of this study verify the usability of COSTaRS mobile application.

Modern computer systems are complex. Even in the best of conditions, it can be difficult to understand the behavior of the system and identify why certain actions are occurring. Existing systems attempt to provide insight by reviewing the effects of actions on the system and estimating their cause. As computer systems are strongly driven by actions of the user, we propose an approach to identify processes which have interacted with the user and provide data to which system behaviors were caused by the user. We implement three sensors within the graphical user interface capable of extracting the necessary information to identify these processes. We show our instrumentation is effective in characterizing applications with an on-screen presence, and provide data towards the determination of user intentions. We prove that our method for obtaining the information from the user interface can be done in an efficient manner with minimal overheads.

" Three dimensional travel in immersive virtual environments (IVE) has been a difficult problem since the beginning of virtual reality (VR), basically due to the difficulty of designing an intuitive, efficient, and precise three degrees of freedom (DOF) interface which can map the user's finite local movements in the real world to a potentially infinite virtual space. Inspired by the Silver Surfer Sci-Fi movie and the popularity of the Nintendo Wii Balance Board interface, a surfboard interface appears to be a good solution to this problem. Based on this idea, I designed and developed a VR Silver Surfer system which allows a user to surf in the sky of an infinite virtual environment, using either an isometric balance board or an elastic tilt board. Although the balance board is the industrial standard of board interface, the tilt board seems to provide the user more intuitive, realistic and enjoyable experiences, without any sacrifice of efficiency or precision. To validate this hypothesis we designed and conducted a user study that compared the two board interfaces in three independent experiments that break the travel procedure into separate DOFs. The results showed that in all experiments, the tilt board was not only as efficient and precise as the balance board, but also more intuitive, realistic and fun. In addition, despite the popularity of the balance board in the game industry, most subjects in the study preferred the tilt board in general, and in fact complained that the balance board could have been the cause of possible motion sickness. "

Creating for the first time GUI (graphical user interface) applications is an endeavor that can be most challenging. This article introduces the general concepts of GUIs and the need to interact with GUI elements only on the so called "GUI thread". The concepts pertain to GUI applications written for Windows, Linux and MacOS alike. Using Java libraries for creating Rexx GUI applications makes these Rexx GUI applications totally platform independent. Taking advantage of BSF4ooRexx even the powerful JavaFX GUI libraries can be exploited by pure Rexx, allowing Rexx programmers to create the most demanding and complex GUI applications in an unparalleled easiness in an astonishing short period of time. The introduced GUI concepts will be demonstrated with short nutshell examples exploiting the JavaFX GUI libraries, empowering the Rexx programmers with the ability to create stable and error free GUI applications in Rexx.