Browsing by Subject "Printing"

This dissertation examines the translation and printing of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic of Turkey (1820-1938). As most Islamic scholars deem the Qur'an inimitable divine speech, the idea of translating the Qur'an has been surrounded with concern since the first centuries of Islam; printing aroused fears about ritual purity and threatened the traditional trade of the scribes. This study examines how Turkish Muslims challenged these concerns and asserted the necessity to print and translate the Qur'an in order to make the text more accessible.

With the spread of the printing press and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qur'an translations have become increasingly important as means of transmitting the meaning of the text to expanding audiences. I investigate the rise of Qur'an translation through a historical survey of Ottoman and Turkish language translations and an examination of the debates surrounding them waged in periodicals, government archives, and monographs. While Turkish translations have often been construed as a product of nationalism, I argue that the rise of translation began with a renewed emphasis on the Qur'anic theme of intelligibility bolstered by the availability of printed books, the spread of state schools, and increased knowledge of European history and intellectual currents. Turkish nationalists later adopted and advocated the issue, reconstruing the "Turkish Qur'an" as a nationalist symbol.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning of Qur'an translation itself has changed and incorporated a variety of new concerns. Asserting translation of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire became synecdoche for a new vision of Muslim authority and modernity that reduced the role of the ulama and created space for interpretive plurality on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, some Turkish intellectuals came to appreciate the symbolic value of Turkish renderings for the assertion of national identity in the Islamic sphere. While the notion of translation as replacement has withered, in practice, translations have come to play a robust role in Turkish Muslim life as supplement and counterpoint to the Qur'anic text.

Scatter in medical imaging is typically cast off as image-related noise that detracts from meaningful diagnosis. It is therefore typically rejected or removed from medical images. However, it has been found that every material, including cancerous tissue, has a unique X-ray coherent scatter signature that can be used to identify the material or tissue. Such scatter-based tissue-identification provides the advantage of locating and identifying particular materials over conventional anatomical imaging through X-ray radiography. A coded aperture X-ray coherent scatter spectral imaging system has been developed in our group to classify different tissue types based on their unique scatter signatures. Previous experiments using our prototype have demonstrated that the depth-resolved coherent scatter spectral imaging system (CACSSI) can discriminate healthy and cancerous tissue present in the path of a non-destructive x-ray beam. A key to the successful optimization of CACSSI as a clinical imaging method is to obtain anatomically accurate phantoms of the human body. This thesis describes the development and fabrication of 3D printed anatomical scatter phantoms of the breast and lung.

The purpose of this work is to accurately model different breast geometries using a tissue equivalent phantom, and to classify these tissues in a coherent x-ray scatter imaging system. Tissue-equivalent anatomical phantoms were designed to assess the capability of the CACSSI system to classify different types of breast tissue (adipose, fibroglandular, malignant). These phantoms were 3D printed based on DICOM data obtained from CT scans of prone breasts. The phantoms were tested through comparison of measured scatter signatures with those of adipose and fibroglandular tissue from literature. Tumors in the phantom were modeled using a variety of biological tissue including actual surgically excised benign and malignant tissue specimens. Lung based phantoms have also been printed for future testing. Our imaging system has been able to define the location and composition of the various materials in the phantom. These phantoms were used to characterize the CACSSI system in terms of beam width and imaging technique. The result of this work showed accurate modeling and characterization of the phantoms through comparison of the tissue-equivalent form factors to those from literature. The physical construction of the phantoms, based on actual patient anatomy, was validated using mammography and computed tomography to visually compare the clinical images to those of actual patient anatomy.