Browsing Duke Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 3452
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A 3D Active Microwave Imaging System for Breast Cancer Screening
(2008-12-11)A 3D microwave imaging system suitable for clinical trials has been developed. The anatomy, histology, and pathology of breast cancer were all carefully considered in the development of this system. The central component ... -
3D Microwave Imaging through Full Wave Methods for Heterogenous Media
(2011)In this thesis, a 3D microwave imaging method is developed for a microwave imaging system with an arbitrary background medium. In the previous study on the breast cancer detection of our research group, a full wave inverse ... -
A Formal Framework for Designing Verifiable Protocols
(2017)Protocols play critical roles in computer systems today, including managing resources, facilitating communication, and coordinating actions of components. It is highly desirable to formally verify protocols, to provide a ... -
A Framework for Dissecting and Applying Bacterial Antibiotic Responses
(2017)An essential property of microbial communities is the ability to survive a disturbance. This is readily observed in bacteria, which have developed the ability to survive every antibiotic treatment at an alarming rate, ... -
A mitotic DNA damage response requiring FANCD2 enables mitosis with broken DNA
(2017)In order to maintain genome integrity cells employ a set of well conserved DNA damage checkpoints. DNA damage checkpoints are active during interphase and serve to prevent mitosis with broken DNA. Mitosis with broken DNA ... -
A Multi-Disciplinary Systems Approach for Modeling and Predicting Physiological Responses and Biomechanical Movement Patterns
(2017)It is currently an exciting time to be doing research at the intersection of sports and engineering. Advances in wearable sensor technology now enable large quantities of physiological and biomechanical data to be collected ... -
A New Hybrid Free-Wake Model for Wind Turbine Aerodynamics with Application to Wake Steering
(2017)Wind energy has emerged as one of the most promising and rapidly growing renewable energy technologies in the United States and over the world. The offshore wind energy is of special interest because it has more consistent ... -
A Novel Vascular Graft Diagnostic and Reversible Aptamers for the Purification of Therapeutic Cells
(2017)Creation of novel tools for biomedical applications is critical for the improvement of patient diagnostics and therapeutics. Two particularly important needs lie in (1) improved in vitro testing and increased performance ... -
A novel, non-apoptotic role for Scythe/BAT3: a functional switch between the pro- and anti-proliferative roles of p21 during the cell cycle.
(PLoS One, 2012)BACKGROUND: Scythe/BAT3 is a member of the BAG protein family whose role in apoptosis has been extensively studied. However, since the developmental defects observed in Bat3-null mouse embryos cannot be explained solely ... -
A PK2/Bv8/PROK2 antagonist suppresses tumorigenic processes by inhibiting angiogenesis in glioma and blocking myeloid cell infiltration in pancreatic cancer.
(PLoS One, 2013)Infiltration of myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment is often associated with enhanced angiogenesis and tumor progression, resulting in poor prognosis in many types of cancer. The polypeptide chemokine PK2 (Bv8, ... -
A Systems Thinking, Community-Based Exploration of Health Equity and Agency: Women’s Migraine as a Paradigmatic Case
(2017)Background. Creating health equity—“the attainment of the highest level of health for all people”— is a core tenet of public health (American Public Health Association, 2015; United States Department of Health and Human ... -
Abl Family Kinases Regulate Endothelial Function
(2013)The vasculature has a crucial function in normal physiology, enabling the transport of oxygen and nutrients to cells throughout the body. In turn, endothelial cells, which form the inner-most lining of blood vessels, are ... -
Abl Kinases Modulate Epithelial Architecture by Regulating Beta1 Integrin and c-Met Signals
(2011)Normal development and homeostasis require dynamic and tight regulation of epithelial architecture. Abnormal epithelial physiology is associated with various pathological conditions including cancers, and may be induced ... -
Abl Tyrosine Kinases Mediate Intercellular Adhesion
(2008-04-24)Adherens junctions are calcium-dependent cell-cell contacts formed during epithelial morphogenesis that link neighboring cells via cadherin receptors. Coordinated regulation of the actin cytoskeleton by the Rho GTPases is ... -
ABSOLUTE QUANTIFICATION IN SMALL PLANT RADIOTRACER STUDIES
(2017)The main objective of this dissertation research is to develop measurement and data-analysis tools for improving the quantitative accuracy of radiotracer studies of small plants, e.g., grasses in their early growth stages ... -
The Abundance and Behavioral Ecology of Cape Cod Gray Seals Under Predation Risk From White Sharks
(2016)The ultimate goal of wildlife recovery is abundance growth of a species, though it must also involve the reestablishment of the species’ ecological role within ecosystems frequently modified by humans. Reestablishment and ... -
Accelerated Sepsis Diagnosis by Seamless Integration of Nucleic Acid Purification and Detection
(2014)<bold>Background</bold> The diagnosis of sepsis is challenging because the infection can be caused by more than 50 species of pathogens that might exist in the bloodstream in very low concentrations, e.g., less than 1 ... -
The Acceleration of the Diffusion-Limited Pump-and-Treat Aquifer Remediation with Pulsed Pumping that Generates Deep Sweeps and Vortex Ejections in Dead-End Pores
(2011)<p>Clean water is a critical natural resource. We do not have much available: only 2.5% of water on Earth is freshwater and of that only 31% is in liquid form. 96% of the liquid fresh water is groundwater. Unfortunately ... -
Accessing Long-lived Nuclear Spin States in Chemically Equivalent Spin Systems: Theory, Simulation, Experiment and Implication for Hyperpolarization
(2014)Recent work has shown that hyperpolarized magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HP-MRS) can trace in vivo metabolism of biomolecules and is therefore extremely promising for diagnostic imaging. The most severe challenge this ... -
Accrual Noise Ratio as a Measure of Accrual Reliability
(2009)I develop an empirical model that estimates a firm-specific accrual noise ratio (ANR), an operational and statistically grounded measure of accrual reliability, and test the measure's construct validity. The model allows ...
