Calidad de Vida: An Exploratory Investigation of Latino Breast Cancer Survivors and Intimate Partners

Advances in addressing psychosocial issues related to cancer treatment and prevention are not reaching all survivors equally. Latina breast cancer survivors and intimate partners are underrepresented in psychosocial interventions, and there is a scarcity of research on the influence of cancer on Latino couples’ quality of life. The purpose of this manuscript is to present findings from a trans-linguistic, dyadic qualitative research study aimed at exploring the influence of cancer on quality of life for Latina breast cancer survivors and their intimate partners. Results highlight several areas that are helpful and hindering to supporting survivorship

Contributions to Real-time Metric Localisation with Wearable Vision Systems

Under the rapid development of electronics and computer science in the last years, cameras have becomeomnipresent nowadays, to such extent that almost everybody is able to carry one at all times embedded intotheir cellular phone. What makes cameras specially appealing for us is their ability to quickly capture a lot ofinformation of the environment encoded in one image or video, allowing us to immortalize special moments inour life or share reliable visual information of the environment with other persons. However, while the task ofextracting the information from an image may by trivial for us, in the case of computers complex algorithmswith a high computational burden are required to transform a raw image into useful information. In this sense, the same rapid development in computer science that allowed the widespread of cameras has enabled also the possibility of real-time application of previously practically infeasible algorithms.Among the current fields of research in the computer vision community, this thesis is specially concerned inmetric localisation and mapping algorithms. These algorithms are a key component in many practical applications such as robot navigation, augmented reality or reconstructing 3D models of the environment.The goal of this thesis is to delve into visual localisation and mapping from vision, paying special attentionto conventional and unconventional cameras which can be easily worn or handled by a human. In this thesis Icontribute in the following aspects of the visual odometry and SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping)pipeline:- Generalised Monocular SLAM for catadioptric central cameras- Resolution of the scale problem in monocular vision- Dense RGB-D odometry- Robust place recognition- Pose-graph optimisatio

Transverse momentum dependent distributions in e+e−e^+e^- and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering using jets

The extraction of transverse momentum dependent distributions (TMDs) in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS) is complicated by the presence of both initial- and final-state nonperturbative physics. We recently proposed measuring jets (instead of hadrons) as a solution, showing that for the Winner-Take-All jet axis the same factorization formulae valid for hadrons applied to jets of arbitrary size. This amounts to simply replacing TMD fragmentation functions by our TMD jet functions. In this paper we present the calculation of these jet functions at one loop. We obtain phenomenological results for $e^+e^- \to$ dijet (Belle II, LEP) and SIDIS (HERA, EIC) with a jet, building on the arTeMiDe code. Surprisingly, we find that the limit of large jet radius describes the full $R$ results extremely well, and we extract the two-loop jet function in this limit using Event2, allowing us to achieve N$^3$LL accuracy. We demonstrate the perturbative convergence of our predictions and explore the kinematic dependence of the cross section. Finally, we investigate the sensitivity to nonperturbative physics, demonstrating that jets are a promising probe of proton structure.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figures. v4: fixed an important typo in table 1 concerning the scaling of modes, together with minor typos across the tex

Automated analysis of small animal PET studies through deformable registration to an atlas

Purpose: This work aims to develop a methodology for automated atlas-guided analysis of small animal positron emission tomography (PET) data through deformable registration to an anatomical mouse model. Methods: A non-rigid registration technique is used to put into correspondence relevant anatomical regions of rodent CT images from combined PET/CT studies to corresponding CT images of the Digimouse anatomical mouse model. The latter provides a pre-segmented atlas consisting of 21 anatomical regions suitable for automated quantitative analysis. Image registration is performed using a package based on the Insight Toolkit allowing the implementation of various image registration algorithms. The optimal parameters obtained for deformable registration were applied to simulated and experimental mouse PET/CT studies. The accuracy of the image registration procedure was assessed by segmenting mouse CT images into seven regions: brain, lungs, heart, kidneys, bladder, skeleton and the rest of the body. This was accomplished prior to image registration using a semi-automated algorithm. Each mouse segmentation was transformed using the parameters obtained during CT to CT image registration. The resulting segmentation was compared with the original Digimouse atlas to quantify image registration accuracy using established metrics such as the Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance. PET images were then transformed using the same technique and automated quantitative analysis of tracer uptake performed. Results: The Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance show fair to excellent agreement and a mean registration mismatch distance of about 6mm. The results demonstrate good quantification accuracy in most of the regions, especially the brain, but not in the bladder, as expected. Normalized mean activity estimates were preserved between the reference and automated quantification techniques with relative errors below 10% in most of the organs considered. Conclusion: The proposed automated quantification technique is reliable, robust and suitable for fast quantification of preclinical PET data in large serial studie