This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

Displaying 41 - 50 of 83
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Description
Aging-related damage and failure in structures, such as fatigue cracking, corrosion, and delamination, are critical for structural integrity. Most engineering structures have embedded defects such as voids, cracks, inclusions from manufacturing. The properties and locations of embedded defects are generally unknown and hard to detect in complex engineering structures.

Aging-related damage and failure in structures, such as fatigue cracking, corrosion, and delamination, are critical for structural integrity. Most engineering structures have embedded defects such as voids, cracks, inclusions from manufacturing. The properties and locations of embedded defects are generally unknown and hard to detect in complex engineering structures. Therefore, early detection of damage is beneficial for prognosis and risk management of aging infrastructure system.

Non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) are widely used for this purpose. Different types of NDT techniques have been proposed for the damage detection, such as optical image, ultrasound wave, thermography, eddy current, and microwave. The focus in this study is on the wave-based detection method, which is grouped into two major categories: feature-based damage detection and model-assisted damage detection. Both damage detection approaches have their own pros and cons. Feature-based damage detection is usually very fast and doesn’t involve in the solution of the physical model. The key idea is the dimension reduction of signals to achieve efficient damage detection. The disadvantage is that the loss of information due to the feature extraction can induce significant uncertainties and reduces the resolution. The resolution of the feature-based approach highly depends on the sensing path density. Model-assisted damage detection is on the opposite side. Model-assisted damage detection has the ability for high resolution imaging with limited number of sensing paths since the entire signal histories are used for damage identification. Model-based methods are time-consuming due to the requirement for the inverse wave propagation solution, which is especially true for the large 3D structures.

The motivation of the proposed method is to develop efficient and accurate model-based damage imaging technique with limited data. The special focus is on the efficiency of the damage imaging algorithm as it is the major bottleneck of the model-assisted approach. The computational efficiency is achieved by two complimentary components. First, a fast forward wave propagation solver is developed, which is verified with the classical Finite Element(FEM) solution and the speed is 10-20 times faster. Next, efficient inverse wave propagation algorithms is proposed. Classical gradient-based optimization algorithms usually require finite difference method for gradient calculation, which is prohibitively expensive for large degree of freedoms. An adjoint method-based optimization algorithms is proposed, which avoids the repetitive finite difference calculations for every imaging variables. Thus, superior computational efficiency can be achieved by combining these two methods together for the damage imaging. A coupled Piezoelectric (PZT) damage imaging model is proposed to include the interaction between PZT and host structure. Following the formulation of the framework, experimental validation is performed on isotropic and anisotropic material with defects such as cracks, delamination, and voids. The results show that the proposed method can detect and reconstruct multiple damage simultaneously and efficiently, which is promising to be applied to complex large-scale engineering structures.
ContributorsChang, Qinan (Author) / Liu, Yongming (Thesis advisor) / Mignolet, Marc (Committee member) / Chattopadhyay, Aditi (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has shown benefits beyond its original therapeutic application, though there is a lack of research into these benefits in healthy and athletic populations. To address this gap in the VNS literature, the present study addresses the feasibility and possible efficacy of transcutaneous VNS (tVNS) in improving

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has shown benefits beyond its original therapeutic application, though there is a lack of research into these benefits in healthy and athletic populations. To address this gap in the VNS literature, the present study addresses the feasibility and possible efficacy of transcutaneous VNS (tVNS) in improving performance and various biometrics during two athletic tasks: golf tee shots and baseball pitching. Performance, cortical dynamics, anxiety measures, muscle excitation, and heart rate characteristics were assessed before and after stimulation using electroencephalography (EEG), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), and electrocardiography (ECG) during the baseball and golf tasks as well as electromyography (EMG) for muscle excitation in the golf participants. Golfers exhibited increased perceived quality of each repetition (independent from outcome) and an improvement in state and trait anxiety after stimulation. Golfers in the active stimulation group also showed a greater reduction in right upper trapezius muscle excitation when compared to the sham stimulation group. Baseball pitchers exhibited an increase in perceived quality of each repetition (independent from outcome) after active stimulation but not an improvement of state and trait anxiety. No significant effects of stimulation Priming, stimulation Type, or the Priming×Type interaction were seen in heart rate, EEG, or performance in the golf or baseball tasks. The present study supports the feasibility of tVNS in sports and athletic tasks and suggests the need for future research to investigate further into the effects of tVNS on the performance, psychologic, and physiologic attributes of athletes during competition.
ContributorsLindley, Kyle (Author) / Tyler, William J (Thesis advisor) / Wyckoff, Sarah (Committee member) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Sleep is an essential human function. Modern day society has made it so that sleep is prioritized less and less. Professionals in critical positions such as doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians can often have hectic schedules that are unforgiving toward sleep due to the increase in shift work that

Sleep is an essential human function. Modern day society has made it so that sleep is prioritized less and less. Professionals in critical positions such as doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians can often have hectic schedules that are unforgiving toward sleep due to the increase in shift work that dominates these fields. Sleep deficits can have detrimental effects on one’s psyche and mood. Depression and anxiety both have high comorbidity rates with insomnia because of sleeping deficits. Transdermal Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) offers a potential solution to improving sleep quality and mood by modulating the ascending reticular activating system (RAS). This system starts in the anterior portion of the head with trigeminal nerve branches and is stimulated using a 500-550 Hz waveform.

In this experiment Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scores are recorded daily to monitor mood differences between pre and post treatment (TENS vs Sham). PANAS scores were found to be insignificant between groups. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and Fitbit were chosen to study perceived sleep, and objective sleep. Both PSQI, and Fitbit found insignificant differences between TENS and Sham. Finally, the Beck Depression and Beck Anxiety Inventories were administered weekly to determine if there are immediate changes to depressive and anxiety symptom, after a week of treatment (TENS vs Sham). A significant difference was found between the pre and post of the TENS treatment group. The TENS group was not found to be significantly different from Sham, potentially the result of a placebo effect. These results were found with n=10 participants in the TENS treatment group and n=6 in the sham group.
ContributorsUdave, Ceasar (Author) / Tyler, William J (Thesis advisor) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Wyckoff, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Existing theories suggest that evidence is accumulated before making a decision with competing goals. In motor tasks, reward and motor costs have been shown to influence the decision, but the interaction between these two variables has not been studied in depth. A novel reward-based sensorimotor decision-making task was developed to

Existing theories suggest that evidence is accumulated before making a decision with competing goals. In motor tasks, reward and motor costs have been shown to influence the decision, but the interaction between these two variables has not been studied in depth. A novel reward-based sensorimotor decision-making task was developed to investigate how reward and motor costs interact to influence decisions. In human subjects, two targets of varying size and reward were presented. After a series of three tones, subjects initiated a movement as one of the targets disappeared. Reward was awarded when participants reached through the remaining target within a specific amount of time. Subjects had to initiate a movement before they knew which target remained. Reward was found to be the only factor that influenced the initial reach. When reward was increased, there was a lower probability of intermediate movements. Both target size and reward lowered reaction times individually and jointly. This interaction can be interpreted as the effect of the expected value, which suggests that reward and target size are not evaluated independently during motor planning. Curvature, or the changing of motor plans, was driven primarily by the target size. After an initial decision was made, the motor costs to switch plans and hit the target had the largest impact on the curvature. An interaction between the reward and target size was also found for curvature, suggesting that the expected value of the target influences the changing of motor plans. Reward, target size, and the interaction between the two were all significant factors for different parts of the decision-making process.
ContributorsBoege, Scott (Author) / Santello, Marco (Thesis advisor) / Fine, Justin (Committee member) / McClure, Samuel (Committee member) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is sub-field of statistical machine learning that is useful for problems that involve having only a few labeled instances with predictor (X) and target (Y) information, and abundance of unlabeled instances that only have predictor (X) information. SSL harnesses the target information available in the limited

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is sub-field of statistical machine learning that is useful for problems that involve having only a few labeled instances with predictor (X) and target (Y) information, and abundance of unlabeled instances that only have predictor (X) information. SSL harnesses the target information available in the limited labeled data, as well as the information in the abundant unlabeled data to build strong predictive models. However, not all the included information is useful. For example, some features may correspond to noise and including them will hurt the predictive model performance. Additionally, some instances may not be as relevant to model building and their inclusion will increase training time and potentially hurt the model performance. The objective of this research is to develop novel SSL models to balance data inclusivity and usability. My dissertation research focuses on applications of SSL in healthcare, driven by problems in brain cancer radiomics, migraine imaging, and Parkinson’s Disease telemonitoring.

The first topic introduces an integration of machine learning (ML) and a mechanistic model (PI) to develop an SSL model applied to predicting cell density of glioblastoma brain cancer using multi-parametric medical images. The proposed ML-PI hybrid model integrates imaging information from unbiopsied regions of the brain as well as underlying biological knowledge from the mechanistic model to predict spatial tumor density in the brain.

The second topic develops a multi-modality imaging-based diagnostic decision support system (MMI-DDS). MMI-DDS consists of modality-wise principal components analysis to incorporate imaging features at different aggregation levels (e.g., voxel-wise, connectivity-based, etc.), a constrained particle swarm optimization (cPSO) feature selection algorithm, and a clinical utility engine that utilizes inverse operators on chosen principal components for white-box classification models.

The final topic develops a new SSL regression model with integrated feature and instance selection called s2SSL (with “s2” referring to selection in two different ways: feature and instance). s2SSL integrates cPSO feature selection and graph-based instance selection to simultaneously choose the optimal features and instances and build accurate models for continuous prediction. s2SSL was applied to smartphone-based telemonitoring of Parkinson’s Disease patients.
ContributorsGaw, Nathan (Author) / Li, Jing (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Hu, Leland (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
This dissertation addresses access management problems that occur in both emergency and outpatient clinics with the objective of allocating the available resources to improve performance measures by considering the trade-offs. Two main settings are considered for estimating patient willingness-to-wait (WtW) behavior for outpatient appointments with statistical analyses of data: allocation

This dissertation addresses access management problems that occur in both emergency and outpatient clinics with the objective of allocating the available resources to improve performance measures by considering the trade-offs. Two main settings are considered for estimating patient willingness-to-wait (WtW) behavior for outpatient appointments with statistical analyses of data: allocation of the limited booking horizon to patients of different priorities by using time windows in an outpatient setting considering patient behavior, and allocation of hospital beds to admitted Emergency Department (ED) patients. For each chapter, a different approach based on the problem context is developed and the performance is analyzed by implementing analytical and simulation models. Real hospital data is used in the analyses to provide evidence that the methodologies introduced are beneficial in addressing real life problems, and real improvements can be achievable by using the policies that are suggested.

This dissertation starts with studying an outpatient clinic context to develop an effective resource allocation mechanism that can improve patient access to clinic appointments. I first start with identifying patient behavior in terms of willingness-to-wait to an outpatient appointment. Two statistical models are developed to estimate patient WtW distribution by using data on booked appointments and appointment requests. Several analyses are conducted on simulated data to observe effectiveness and accuracy of the estimations.

Then, this dissertation introduces a time windows based policy that utilizes patient behavior to improve access by using appointment delay as a lever. The policy improves patient access by allocating the available capacity to the patients from different priorities by dividing the booking horizon into time intervals that can be used by each priority group which strategically delay lower priority patients.

Finally, the patient routing between ED and inpatient units to improve the patient access to hospital beds is studied. The strategy that captures the trade-off between patient safety and quality of care is characterized as a threshold type. Through the simulation experiments developed by real data collected from a hospital, the achievable improvement of implementing such a strategy that considers the safety-quality of care trade-off is illustrated.
ContributorsKilinc, Derya (Author) / Gel, Esma (Thesis advisor) / Pasupathy, Kalyan (Committee member) / Sefair, Jorge (Committee member) / Sir, Mustafa (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Intracellular voltage recordings from single neurons in vitro and in vivo have been fundamental to our understanding of neuronal function. Conventional electrodes and associated positioning systems for intracellular recording in vivo are large and bulky, which has largely restricted their use to single-channel recording from anesthetized animals. Further, intracellular recordings

Intracellular voltage recordings from single neurons in vitro and in vivo have been fundamental to our understanding of neuronal function. Conventional electrodes and associated positioning systems for intracellular recording in vivo are large and bulky, which has largely restricted their use to single-channel recording from anesthetized animals. Further, intracellular recordings are very cumbersome, requiring a high degree of skill not readily achieved in a typical laboratory. This dissertation presents a robotic, head-mountable, MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) based intracellular recording system to overcome the above limitations associated with form-factor, scalability and highly skilled and tedious manual operations required for intracellular recordings. This system combines three distinct technologies: 1) novel microscale, polycrystalline silicon-based electrode for intracellular recording, 2) electrothermal microactuators for precise microscale navigation of the electrode and 3) closed-loop control algorithm for autonomous movement and positioning of electrode inside single neurons. First, two distinct designs of polysilicon-based microscale electrodes were fabricated and tested for intracellular recordings. In the first approach, tips of polysilicon microelectrodes were milled to nanoscale dimensions (<300 nm) using focused ion beam (FIB) to develop polysilicon nanoelectrodes. Polysilicon nanoelectrodes recorded >1.5 mV amplitude, positive-going action potentials and synaptic potentials from neurons in the abdominal ganglion of Aplysia Californica. In the second approach, polysilicon microelectrodes were integrated with miniaturized glass micropipettes filled with electrolyte to fabricate glass-polysilicon microelectrodes. These electrodes consistently recorded high fidelity intracellular potentials from neurons in the abdominal ganglion of Aplysia Californica (Resting Potentials < -35 mV, Action Potentials > 60 mV) as well as the rat motor cortex (Resting Potentials < -50 mV). Next, glass-polysilicon microelectrodes were coupled with microscale electrothermal actuators and controller for autonomous intracellular recordings from single neurons in the abdominal ganglion. Consistent resting potentials (< -35 mV) and action potentials (> 60 mV) were recorded after each successful penetration attempt with the controller and microactuated glass-polysilicon microelectrodes. The success rate of penetration and quality of recordings achieved using electrothermal microactuators were comparable to that of conventional positioning systems. Finally, the feasibility of this miniaturized system to obtain intracellular recordings from single neurons in the motor cortex of rats in vivo is also demonstrated. The MEMS-based system offers significant advantages: 1) reduction in overall size for potential use in behaving animals, 2) scalable approach to potentially realize multi-channel recordings and 3) a viable method to fully automate measurement of intracellular recordings.
ContributorsSampath Kumar, Swathy (Author) / Muthuswamy, Jit (Thesis advisor) / Abbas, James (Committee member) / Hamm, Thomas (Committee member) / Christen, Jennifer Blain (Committee member) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Neural interfacing applications have advanced in complexity, with needs for increasingly high degrees of freedom in prosthetic device control, sharper discrimination in sensory percepts in bidirectional interfaces, and more precise localization of functional connectivity in the brain. As such, there is a growing need for reliable neurophysiological recordings at a

Neural interfacing applications have advanced in complexity, with needs for increasingly high degrees of freedom in prosthetic device control, sharper discrimination in sensory percepts in bidirectional interfaces, and more precise localization of functional connectivity in the brain. As such, there is a growing need for reliable neurophysiological recordings at a fine spatial scale matching that of cortical columnar processing. Penetrating microelectrodes provide localization sufficient to isolate action potential (AP) waveforms, but often suffer from recorded signal deterioration linked to foreign body response. Micro-Electrocorticography (μECoG) surface electrodes elicit lower foreign body response and show greater chronic stability of recorded signals, though they typically lack the signal localization necessary to isolate individual APs. This dissertation validates the recording capacity of a novel, flexible, large area μECoG array with bilayer routing in a feline implant, and explores the ability of conventional μECoG arrays to detect features of neuronal activity in a very high frequency band associated with AP waveforms.

Recordings from both layers of the flexible μECoG array showed frequency features typical of cortical local field potentials (LFP) and were shown to be stable in amplitude over time. Recordings from both layers also showed consistent, frequency-dependent modulation after induction of general anesthesia, with large increases in beta and gamma band and decreases in theta band observed over three experiments. Recordings from conventional μECoG arrays over human cortex showed robust modulation in a high frequency (250-2000 Hz) band upon production of spoken words. Modulation in this band was used to predict spoken words with over 90% accuracy. Basal Ganglia neuronal AP firing was also shown to significantly correlate with various cortical μECoG recordings in this frequency band. Results indicate that μECoG surface electrodes may detect high frequency neuronal activity potentially associated with AP firing, a source of information previously unutilized by these devices.
ContributorsBarton, Cody David (Author) / Greger, Bradley (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Graudejus, Oliver (Committee member) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Transfer learning is a sub-field of statistical modeling and machine learning. It refers to methods that integrate the knowledge of other domains (called source domains) and the data of the target domain in a mathematically rigorous and intelligent way, to develop a better model for the target domain than a

Transfer learning is a sub-field of statistical modeling and machine learning. It refers to methods that integrate the knowledge of other domains (called source domains) and the data of the target domain in a mathematically rigorous and intelligent way, to develop a better model for the target domain than a model using the data of the target domain alone. While transfer learning is a promising approach in various application domains, my dissertation research focuses on the particular application in health care, including telemonitoring of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and radiomics for glioblastoma.

The first topic is a Mixed Effects Transfer Learning (METL) model that can flexibly incorporate mixed effects and a general-form covariance matrix to better account for similarity and heterogeneity across subjects. I further develop computationally efficient procedures to handle unknown parameters and large covariance structures. Domain relations, such as domain similarity and domain covariance structure, are automatically quantified in the estimation steps. I demonstrate METL in an application of smartphone-based telemonitoring of PD.

The second topic focuses on an MRI-based transfer learning algorithm for non-invasive surgical guidance of glioblastoma patients. Limited biopsy samples per patient create a challenge to build a patient-specific model for glioblastoma. A transfer learning framework helps to leverage other patient’s knowledge for building a better predictive model. When modeling a target patient, not every patient’s information is helpful. Deciding the subset of other patients from which to transfer information to the modeling of the target patient is an important task to build an accurate predictive model. I define the subset of “transferrable” patients as those who have a positive rCBV-cell density correlation, because a positive correlation is confirmed by imaging theory and the its respective literature.

The last topic is a Privacy-Preserving Positive Transfer Learning (P3TL) model. Although negative transfer has been recognized as an important issue by the transfer learning research community, there is a lack of theoretical studies in evaluating the risk of negative transfer for a transfer learning method and identifying what causes the negative transfer. My work addresses this issue. Driven by the theoretical insights, I extend Bayesian Parameter Transfer (BPT) to a new method, i.e., P3TL. The unique features of P3TL include intelligent selection of patients to transfer in order to avoid negative transfer and maintain patient privacy. These features make P3TL an excellent model for telemonitoring of PD using an At-Home Testing Device.
ContributorsYoon, Hyunsoo (Author) / Li, Jing (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Hu, Leland S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Injuries and death associated with fall incidences pose a significant burden to society, both in terms of human suffering and economic losses. The main aim of this dissertation is to study approaches that can reduce the risk of falls. One major subset of falls is falls due to neurodegenerative disorders

Injuries and death associated with fall incidences pose a significant burden to society, both in terms of human suffering and economic losses. The main aim of this dissertation is to study approaches that can reduce the risk of falls. One major subset of falls is falls due to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD). Freezing of gait (FOG) is a major cause of falls in this population. Therefore, a new FOG detection method using wavelet transform technique employing optimal sampling window size, update time, and sensor placements for identification of FOG events is created and validated in this dissertation. Another approach to reduce the risk of falls in PD patients is to correctly diagnose PD motor subtypes. PD can be further divided into two subtypes based on clinical features: tremor dominant (TD), and postural instability and gait difficulty (PIGD). PIGD subtype can place PD patients at a higher risk for falls compared to TD patients and, they have worse postural control in comparison to TD patients. Accordingly, correctly diagnosing subtypes can help caregivers to initiate early amenable interventions to reduce the risk of falls in PIGD patients. As such, a method using the standing center-of-pressure time series data has been developed to identify PD motor subtypes in this dissertation. Finally, an intervention method to improve dynamic stability was tested and validated. Unexpected perturbation-based training (PBT) is an intervention method which has shown promising results in regard to improving balance and reducing falls. Although PBT has shown promising results, the efficacy of such interventions is not well understood and evaluated. In other words, there is paucity of data revealing the effects of PBT on improving dynamic stability of walking and flexible gait adaptability. Therefore, the effects

of three types of perturbation methods on improving dynamics stability was assessed. Treadmill delivered translational perturbations training improved dynamic stability, and adaptability of locomotor system in resisting perturbations while walking.
ContributorsRezvanian, Saba (Author) / Lockhart, Thurmon (Thesis advisor) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Lieberman, Abraham (Committee member) / Abbas, James (Committee member) / Deep, Aman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019