A mechatronic haemodialysis system for the treatment of acute renal failure and metabolic disorders

The aim of this project was to produce a fully automated prototype system for the treatment of premature babies who are suffering from renal failure or metabolic disorders. These patients are difficult or impossible to treat conventionally, due to their very small total blood volume and their intolerance to donated blood. There was a strong case for developing a dialysis system specifically designed for the treatment of such patients. The system is based on a manually operated device developed at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle Upon Tyne. It differs from conventional dialysis methods in several ways. Blood access to the patient is via a single venous catheter. Only a very small amount of blood is needed to prime the extracorporeal circuit - this can be as little as 6.8 ml in the smallest patients. This compares very favourably with the volumes needed in conventional circuits, which are in the range of 15 - 40 ml. This small priming volume means that donated blood is not needed to prime the circuit. The clearance and ultrafiltration rates that can be achieved are independent of the rate that blood can be accessed from the patient, since the same blood passes back and forth through the haemofilter several times. The clearances that have been obtained experimentally are consistently above 40% of the mean blood flow rate through the system. The largest mean blood flow rate available is 5 ml/min, so the maximum clearance is approximately 2 ml/min. The maximum ultrafiltration rate that can be obtained is 50 ml/h. The new system is more effective at treating premature babies than conventional dialysis circuits. The hand driven system was tested in vivo and found to work well, so the automated system was developed on a solid foundation. A prototype system has been successfully developed and tested. This thesis details both the development and the testing. The new system uses stepper motors and DC servo motors for actuation, and is controlled by Labwindows/CVI and NIDAQ software running on a standard PC platform. The interface between the PC and the machine is provided by a National Instruments data acquisition board. A comprehensive single fault analysis of the safety of the system was undertaken, including both software and hardware. In vitro testing covered several areas of operation. The accuracy of the ultrafiltration process was established. The clearance rates that could be achieved were determined. The amount of damage caused to the blood by the system was also tested. This was found to be well within acceptable clinical limits. In vivo testing established the feasibility of using a computer algorithm to control the withdrawal of blood from the patient. Finally, the system was successfully used to treat a patient with an in-born metabolic disorder. In summary, a new system has been developed that is superior to any other treatment method currently available for neonates with these types of disorders

Community food ventures

Soup kitchens represent the front line in assisting people who are facing a food emergency. However, as demand for assistance increases, there is also a need to increase the capacity of community based and faith based organizations to provide these services. This case study describes its application in an organization in New York City. (Library-derived description)Everdell, R. (1985). Community food ventures. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.eduMaster of Science (M.S.)School of Community Economic Developmen

Reconsidering the Puebloan Languages in a Southwestern Areal Context

Areal linguistics is the study of diffused linguistic features across different languages which are geographically contiguous and culturally connected. My research attempts to standardize definitions for the vocabulary surrounding linguistic diffusion which will apply cross-areally. I also examine these definitions within the case study of the Pueblo and Southwest regions of North America. These areas have been culturally linked, but no agreement has been made as to whether or not these make up a linguistic area with sub-areas or are both part of a much larger area including the Great Basin, southern Plains, and southern Californian languages

From State to Free-State: The Meaning of the Word 'Republic' from Jean Bodin to John Adams

History of the changing meaning and importance of the word "republic/respublica/république/republik" in major Western cultures and languages since the origin of the term in ancient Rome and its conflation with the Greek term "politeia.

Real Persons on Coins: Ominous Precedents and a Paleofeminist Plea

A brief history of "Liberty" on United States coin

Arguments and adjuncts in O’dam : language-specific realization of a cross-linguistic distinction

This dissertation examines the properties that distinguish argument and adjunct dependents in the O’dam language (Tepiman<Uto-Aztecan) of Durango, Mexico. Verbal dependents, which express the participants involved in the eventuality described by the verb, are divided into different grammatical relationships with that verb (e.g. subject, object, oblique, etc.). Such grammatical functions are commonly assumed to be grouped into two overarching functions: arguments, which express core participants of a predicate and are closely tied to the verb, and adjuncts, which express peripheral participants of a predicate and lack any special morphosyntactic status in regards to the particular verb. There has been a long been an attempt to identify a cross-linguistically valid set of grammatical properties that will cross-linguistically distinguish arguments from adjuncts. I show that O’dam adds a typologically new type of language that does not conform to the standard view of the argument/adjunct distinction. Head-marking underpredicts the number of arguments that ditransitives and denominal verbs have, while most other standard cross linguistically-applied tests for different grammatical function in a large part do not distinguish dependents at all. Instead, the evidence for a thematically-rooted distinction between arguments and adjuncts found in argumenthood tests that mostly constitute wholly language-internal properties. I propose two new language-specific tests of argumenthood specific to O’dam: preverbal (discontinuous) quantification and applicativization. In addition to subjects and objects, preverbal quantification distinguishes different types of benefactive objects, and distinguishes recipients from recipient benefactives. The output of applicativization is hierarchically determined by the valency and argument structure of the verb, providing another probe into underlying argument structure. However, while there is overlap among the various argumenthood tests, the subsets of dependents each test identifies as an argument are not co-extensive. Valency effects on applicativization do not match such effects on head-marking, nor do either line up with preverbal quantification. Rather than finding a uniform behavior for arguments, I ultimately show that adjuncts are the only grammatical function with uniform syntactic behavior, purely because they are the only set of dependents that consistently fails every test. Notable among these are instruments and locatives, which behave as adjuncts regardless of their semantic relation to a predicate. Additionally, I show that O’dam realizes many of the properties predicted to hold for a Pronominal Argument Language (Jelinek 1984), suggesting that argument saturation is done within the verb. However, the interpretation of overt and covert nominals suggests that such argument saturation is not done through an equivalent to a lexical pronoun. This investigation of the argument/adjunct distinction in O’dam adds a more comprehensive empirical account of O’dam verbal syntax, and suggests that the cross-linguistically useful notion of distinctions between grammatical function can sometimes play out through almost entirely language-specific properties.Linguistic

Multispectral imaging of the ocular fundus using light emitting diode illumination

We present an imaging system based on light emitting diode (LED) illumination that produces multispectral optical images of the human ocular fundus. It uses a conventional fundus camera equipped with a high power LED light source and a highly sensitive electron-multiplying charge coupled device camera. It is able to take pictures at a series of wavelengths in rapid succession at short exposure times, thereby eliminating the image shift introduced by natural eye movements (saccades). In contrast with snapshot systems the images retain full spatial resolution. The system is not suitable for applications where the full spectral resolution is required as it uses discrete wavebands for illumination. This is not a problem in retinal imaging where the use of selected wavelengths is common. The modular nature of the light source allows new wavelengths to be introduced easily and at low cost. The use of wavelength-specific LEDs as a source is preferable to white light illumination and subsequent filtering of the remitted light as it minimizes the total light exposure of the subject. The system is controlled via a graphical user interface that enables flexible control of intensity, duration, and sequencing of sources in synchrony with the camera. Our initial experiments indicate that the system can acquire multispectral image sequences of the human retina at exposure times of 0.05 s in the range of 500-620 nm with mean signal to noise ratio of 17 dB (min 11, std 4.5), making it suitable for quantitative analysis with application to the diagnosis and screening of eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration

The μNTS: a wearable, modular, high-density diffuse optical tomography system

We present a wearable, high-density diffuse optical tomography system that can provide a channel density exceeding 6 channels/cm^{2}, with source-detector separations from 10 mm to >60 mm, as measured in-vivo in the adult

Towards cot-side mapping of the sensorimotor cortex in preterm and term infants with wearable high-density diffuse optical tomography

We are translating wearable HD-DOT to the neonatal clinic to investigate healthy and brain-injured infants and establish a model of the developmental trajectory of the infant sensorimotor system