Matching Items (4)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

151671-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Concussion, a subset of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), has recently been brought to the forefront of the media due to a large lawsuit filed against the National Football League. Concussion resulting from injury varies in severity, duration, and type, based on many characteristics about the individual that research does

Concussion, a subset of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), has recently been brought to the forefront of the media due to a large lawsuit filed against the National Football League. Concussion resulting from injury varies in severity, duration, and type, based on many characteristics about the individual that research does not presently understand. Chronic fatigue, poor working memory, impaired self-awareness, and lack of attention to task are symptoms commonly present post-concussion. Currently, there is not a standard method of assessing concussion, nor is there a way to track an individual's recovery, resulting in misguided treatment for better prognosis. The aim of the following study was to determine patient specific higher-order cognitive processing deficits for clinical diagnosis and prognosis of concussion. Six individuals (N=6) were seen during the acute phase of concussion, two of whom were seen subsequently when their symptoms were deemed clinically resolved. Subjective information was collected from both the patient and from neurology testing. Each individual completed a task, in which they were presented with degraded speech, taxing their higher-order cognitive processing. Patient specific behavioral patterns are noted, creating a unique paradigm for mapping subjective and objective data for each patient's strategy to compensate for deficits and understand speech in a difficult listening situation. Keywords: concussion, cognitive processing
ContributorsBerg, Dena (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Caviness, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
152594-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits

The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits that are easily identified or tracked. Indeed it has been shown that patients with enduring symptoms have difficulty describing their problems; therefore, there is an urgent need for a sensitive measure of brain activity that corresponds with higher order cognitive processing. The development of a neurophysiological metric that maps to clinical resolution would inform decisions about diagnosis and prognosis, including the need for clinical intervention to address cognitive deficits. The literature suggests the need for assessment of concussion under cognitively demanding tasks. Here, a joint behavioral- high-density electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm was employed. This allows for the examination of cortical activity patterns during speech comprehension at various levels of degradation in a sentence verification task, imposing the need for higher-order cognitive processes. Eight participants with concussion listened to true-false sentences produced with either moderately to highly intelligible noise-vocoders. Behavioral data were simultaneously collected. The analysis of cortical activation patterns included 1) the examination of event-related potentials, including latency and source localization, and 2) measures of frequency spectra and associated power. Individual performance patterns were assessed during acute injury and a return visit several months following injury. Results demonstrate a combination of task-related electrophysiology measures correspond to changes in task performance during the course of recovery. Further, a discriminant function analysis suggests EEG measures are more sensitive than behavioral measures in distinguishing between individuals with concussion and healthy controls at both injury and recovery, suggesting the robustness of neurophysiological measures during a cognitively demanding task to both injury and persisting pathophysiology.
ContributorsUtianski, Rene (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Caviness, John N (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
152907-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The problem of cooperative radar and communications signaling is investigated. Each system typically considers the other system a source of interference. Consequently, the tradition is to have them operate in orthogonal frequency bands. By considering the radar and communications operations to be a single joint system, performance bounds on a

The problem of cooperative radar and communications signaling is investigated. Each system typically considers the other system a source of interference. Consequently, the tradition is to have them operate in orthogonal frequency bands. By considering the radar and communications operations to be a single joint system, performance bounds on a receiver that observes communications and radar return in the same frequency allocation are derived. Bounds in performance of the joint system is measured in terms of data information rate for communications and radar estimation information rate for the radar. Inner bounds on performance are constructed.
ContributorsChiriyath, Alex (Author) / Bliss, Daniel W (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
154672-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in sharing available bandwidth to avoid spectrum congestion. With an ever-increasing number wireless users, it is critical to develop signal processing based spectrum sharing algorithms to achieve cooperative use of the allocated spectrum among multiple systems in order to reduce

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in sharing available bandwidth to avoid spectrum congestion. With an ever-increasing number wireless users, it is critical to develop signal processing based spectrum sharing algorithms to achieve cooperative use of the allocated spectrum among multiple systems in order to reduce interference between systems. This work studies the radar and communications systems coexistence problem using two main approaches. The first approach develops methodologies to increase radar target tracking performance under low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) conditions due to the coexistence of strong communications interference. The second approach jointly optimizes the performance of both systems by co-designing a common transmit waveform.

When concentrating on improving radar tracking performance, a pulsed radar that is tracking a single target coexisting with high powered communications interference is considered. Although the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the covariance of an unbiased estimator of deterministic parameters provides a bound on the estimation mean squared error (MSE), there exists an SINR threshold at which estimator covariance rapidly deviates from the CRLB. After demonstrating that different radar waveforms experience different estimation SINR thresholds using the Barankin bound (BB), a new radar waveform design method is proposed based on predicting the waveform-dependent BB SINR threshold under low SINR operating conditions.

A novel method of predicting the SINR threshold value for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is proposed. A relationship is shown to exist between the formulation of the BB kernel and the probability of selecting sidelobes for the MLE. This relationship is demonstrated as an accurate means of threshold prediction for the radar target parameter estimation of frequency, time-delay and angle-of-arrival.



For the co-design radar and communications system problem, the use of a common transmit waveform for a pulse-Doppler radar and a multiuser communications system is proposed. The signaling scheme for each system is selected from a class of waveforms with nonlinear phase function by optimizing the waveform parameters to minimize interference between the two systems and interference among communications users. Using multi-objective optimization, a trade-off in system performance is demonstrated when selecting waveforms that minimize both system interference and tracking MSE.
ContributorsKota, John S (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016