Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- All Subjects: Bioinformatics
Motivated by recent studies in motor control and therapy, in this thesis an existing computational framework is used to assess balance impairment and disease severity in people suffering from Parkinson's disease. The framework uses high-dimensional shape descriptors of the reconstructed phase space, of the subjects' center of pressure (CoP) tracings while performing dynamical postural shifts. The performance of the framework is evaluated using a dataset collected from 43 healthy and 17 Parkinson's disease impaired subjects, and outperforms other methods, such as dynamical shift indices and use of chaotic invariants, in assessment of balance impairment.
In this thesis, an unsupervised method is also proposed that measures movement quality assessment of simple actions like sit-to-stand and dynamic posture shifts by modeling the deviation of a given movement from an ideal movement path in the configuration space, i.e. the quality of movement is directly related to similarity to the ideal trajectory, between the start and end pose. The S^1xS^1 configuration space was used to model the interaction of two joint angles in sit-to-stand actions, and the R^2 space was used to model the subject's CoP while performing dynamic posture shifts for application in movement quality estimation.
Molecular pathology makes use of estimates of tumor content (tumor percentage) for pre-analytic and analytic purposes, such as molecular oncology testing, massive parallel sequencing, or next-generation sequencing (NGS), assessment of sample acceptability, accurate quantitation of variants, assessment of copy number changes (among other applications), determination of specimen viability for testing (since many assays require a minimum tumor content to report variants at the limit of detection) may all be improved with more accurate and reproducible estimates of tumor content. Currently, tumor percentages of samples submitted for molecular testing are estimated by visual examination of Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained tissue slides under the microscope by pathologists. These estimations can be automated, expedited, and rendered more accurate by applying machine learning methods on digital whole slide images (WSI).