Optimising Adjuvant Treatment for Colorectal Cancer

The aim of the thesis is to optimize adjuvant treatment for colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. CRC treatment has improved over the decades resulting in improved overall survival of patients. The 5-year overall survival for CRC in the US between 1975 – 1979 was 50.6% while by 2004; it had improved to 65.9%. This is largely due to improvements in surgical and radiation techniques, screening initiatives and more effective chemotherapy drugs. However, when compared to the 5-year overall survival for breast cancer in 2004 of 89.9% (SEER data), it is clear that further improvements in CRC treatment are needed. This thesis evaluated different approaches to further improve overall survival rates and to reduce the acute and late toxicities associated with adjuvant treatment. One of the approaches was to attempt to personalize treatment for colorectal cancer patients using prognostic and predictive biomarkers. The group of patients selected for review were Stage C colon and rectal patients as the risk of recurrence is very high and the 5 year overall survival remains poor at 28% for colon cancer and 33% for rectal cancer. In this era of personalized medicine, the hope is to be able to tailor treatment regimens according to the patient and disease stage to reduce toxicity and improve efficacy. A retrospective analysis of the survival of Stage C rectal cancer patients in a public teaching hospital who received adjuvant chemotherapy after a curative resection was conducted to evaluate the role of adjuvant chemotherapy alone without radiotherapy. An original research study evaluating the role of a candidate marker, s100A4 in the treatment of Stage C colon cancer was also performed to evaluate the possible role of a new candidate biomarker s100A4 in the prognostication of Stage C colon cancer

Chronopoetics: Race, Time, and Narrative in Carlos Bulosan’s 'America Is in the Heart'

The essay examines the politics and poetics of time—specifically, the relationship between race, time, and narrative in Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical work America Is in the Heart. Through a reading of this text, I pursue both a more generalized discussion of the relationship between time and narrative (in the writing of both fiction and history) and the more specific ways in which processes of racialization inflect or rearticulate that relationship. At issue here is the formal challenge, or problem, of representing difference. How does reflecting on temporality tell us something about the limits and possibilities of representational forms? How, for example, has an historical repertoire of temporal constructions of racial otherness (predicated on a discourse of )evolutionary hierarchies) come to bear formally or ideologically on developmental narratives of subject formation

A follow-up study of six members of the Department of Neighborhood Clubs, Children's Aid Association, 1940-1950

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

The Columbia Non-neutral Torus

Final report for the Columbia Non-neutral Torus. This details the results from the design, construction and initial operation of the Columbia Non-neutral Torus

From the Attic to the Screen: An Adaptation of JANE EYRE and WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Jane and Antoinette is an adapted screenplay from the novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Rhys’s novel, written nearly one hundred years after the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847, functions as a prequel to the original text. I develop the two stories into one, cohesive narrative for the screen. The adaptation process includes close analyses of the texts, both independently and in relation to one another. I viewed all film or television adaptations of the two novels and read critical analyses of these adaptations. I also studied adaptation theory and applied those principles to the discipline of screenwriting. This thesis includes a brief preface, which frames the social contexts of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea at the times that they were written. The preface also describes characteristics of film adaptations and my decision-making process. As per traditional screenplay formatting, the premise, synopsis, and script then exist together as an independent work. A bibliography is included at the end. The screenplay is a culmination of the research I conducted and my own creative process. I extract key elements from each novel without attempting complete fidelity to either text. This creates space for the collaborative authorship of Brontë, Rhys, and I to share in Jane and Antoinette

Experimental confirmation of efficient island divertor operation and successful neoclassical transport optimization in Wendelstein 7-X

We present recent highlights from the most recent operation phases of Wendelstein 7-X, the most advanced stellarator in the world. Stable detachment with good particle exhaust, low impurity content, and energy confinement times exceeding 100 ms, have been maintained for tens of seconds. Pellet fueling allows for plasma phases with reduced ion-temperature-gradient turbulence, and during such phases, the overall confinement is so good (energy confinement times often exceeding 200 ms) that the attained density and temperature profiles would not have been possible in less optimized devices, since they would have had neoclassical transport losses exceeding the heating applied in W7-X. This provides proof that the reduction of neoclassical transport through magnetic field optimization is successful. W7-X plasmas generally show good impurity screening and high plasma purity, but there is evidence of longer impurity confinement times during turbulence-suppressed phases

Functional Electric Stimulation Cycle Ergometry Training Effect on Lower Limb Muscles in Acute SCI Individuals

The purpose of this study was to compare three different intervals for a between sets rest period during a common isokinetic knee extension strength-testing protocol of twenty older Brazilian men (66.30 ± 3.92 yrs). The volunteers underwent unilateral knee extension (Biodex System 3) testing to determine their individual isokinetic peak torque at 60, 90, and 120° ·s-1. The contraction speeds and the rest periods between sets (30, 60 and 90 s) were randomly performed in three different days with a minimum rest period of 48 hours. Significant differences between and within sets were analyzed using a One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures. Although, at angular velocity of 60°·s-1 produced a higher peak torque, there were no significant differences in peak torque among any of the rest periods. Likewise, there were no significant differences between mean peak torque among all resting periods (30, 60 and 90s) at angular velocities of 90 and 120°·s-1. The results showed that during a common isokinetic strength testing protocol a between set rest period of at least 30 s is sufficient for recovery before the next test set in older men

Physics-regularized neural network of the ideal-MHD solution operator in Wendelstein 7-X configurations

The stellarator is a promising concept to produce energy from nuclear fusion by magnetically confining a high-pressure plasma. In a stellarator, the confining field is three-dimensional, and the computational cost of solving the 3D MHD equations currently limits stellarator research and design. Although data-driven approaches have been proposed to provide fast 3D MHD equilibria, the accuracy with which equilibrium properties are reconstructed is unknown. In this work, we describe an artificial neural network (NN) that quickly approximates the ideal-MHD solution operator in Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) configurations. This model fulfils equilibrium symmetries by construction. The MHD force residual regularizes the solution of the NN to satisfy the ideal-MHD equations. The model predicts the equilibrium solution with high accuracy, and it faithfully reconstructs global equilibrium quantities and proxy functions used in stellarator optimization. The regularization term enforces that the NN reduces the ideal-MHD force residual, and solutions that are better than ground truth equilibria can be obtained at inference time. We also optimize W7-X magnetic configurations, where desiderable configurations can be found in terms of fast particle confinement. This work demonstrates with which accuracy NN models can approximate the 3D ideal-MHD solution operator and reconstruct equilibrium properties of interest, and it suggests how they might be used to optimize stellarator magnetic configurations.Comment: 46 pages, 23 figures, to be submitted to Nuclear Fusio