Alternative Method for Posterior Lumbar Discectomy and Development of Associated Bench Top Test

A discectomy is a common surgical procedure performed to remove the fibrous disc material between adjacent vertebrae in the spine, known as vertebral disc. Current methods and tools used in discectomies are time consuming and potentially dangerous, with opportunity for human error. There is a need for a new method of disc removal that can improve clinical results by reducing surgical times, preventing damage to surrounding anatomy, and more thoroughly removing the vertebral disc. A reduction in surgery times and increase of effective disc removal will help to increase success, recovery, and spinal fusion rates. This project aims to provide a prototype instrument and associated bench top test focused on providing a more streamlined and successful discectomy procedure from the posterior approach while mitigating the risks associated with human error. Collaboration with industry experts resulted in the modification of commonly-used pituitary rongeurs to include in-line aspiration through surgical tubing. This development improves upon the current surgical technique by eliminating the need to remove the instrument from the patient, thus reducing time requirements and preventing the need for additional training. Current discectomy methods require up to three hours for a full disc removal under optimal conditions. This method aims to reduce that requirement by approximately half. In addition, research into synthetic disc material, coupled with available 3D printing technology, has yielded a bench top test that can be used in regulatory validation and proof of concept. This test aims to recreate disc anatomy without requiring access to expensive and single-use cadavers.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1195/thumbnail.jp

Boiling a Unitary Fermi Liquid

We study the thermal evolution of a highly spin-imbalanced, homogeneous Fermi gas with unitarity limited interactions, from a Fermi liquid of polarons at low temperatures to a classical Boltzmann gas at high temperatures. Radio-frequency spectroscopy gives access to the energy, lifetime, and short-range correlations of Fermi polarons at low temperatures $T$. In this regime, we observe a characteristic $T^2$ dependence of the spectral width, corresponding to the quasiparticle decay rate expected for a Fermi liquid. At high $T$, the spectral width decreases again towards the scattering rate of the classical, unitary Boltzmann gas, $\propto T^{-1/2}$. In the transition region between the quantum degenerate and classical regime, the spectral width attains its maximum, on the scale of the Fermi energy, indicating the breakdown of a quasiparticle description. Density measurements in a harmonic trap directly reveal the majority dressing cloud surrounding the minority spins and yield the compressibility along with the effective mass of Fermi polarons.Comment: Accepted version at PR

A Web-Based Ticketing System : Improving IT Support Efficiency and Employee Productivity

This thesis describes the development of a web based ticketing system with the aim of enhancing IT support efficiency and employee productivity. The research design was based on an iterative agile-based prototyping methodology which more or less facilitated regular testing and improvement of the system features of each iteration based on the feedbacks received. The system enables users to safely login, open support ticket, track progress and connect with IT personnel based on their respective roles. Employee, Admin, or Super Admin. A new modern architecture: full-stack was deployed, based on React.js for the user interface, Node.js and Express.js for backend logic and MongoDB as a robust and scalable database. The system as well incorporates critical aspects such as role based access control, ticket prioritization and activity tracking to make it responsive and accountability-based. To verify the performance and usability of the system structured functional and user testing was carried out. These assessments showed that the system does indeed cut the time taken to resolve tickets and improve communication within IT teams. This learnt a full stack development, secure authentication as well as user-centric development. The outcome is a practical application that can support efficient IT operations, reduced downtime and service delivery improvements across departments

Music Retrieval System Using Query-by-Humming

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a particular research area of great interest because there are various strategies to retrieve music. To retrieve music, it is important to find a similarity between the input query and the matching music. Several solutions have been proposed that are currently being used in the application domain(s) such as Query- by-Example (QBE) which takes a sample of an audio recording playing in the background and retrieves the result. However, there is no efficient approach to solve this problem in a Query-by-Humming (QBH) application. In a Query-by-Humming application, the aim is to retrieve music that is most similar to the hummed query in an efficient manner. In this paper, I shall discuss the different music information retrieval techniques and their system architectures. Moreover, I will discuss the Query-by-Humming approach and its various techniques that allow for a novel method for music retrieval. Lastly, we conclude that the proposed system was effective combined with the MIDI dataset and custom hummed queries that were recorded from a sample of people. Although, the MRR was measured at 0.82 – 0.90 for only 100 songs in the database, the retrieval time was very high. Therefore, improving the retrieval time and Deep Learning approaches are suggested for future work

Improving User Experiences for Wiki Systems

Wiki systems are web applications that allow users to collaboratively manage the content. Such systems enable users to read and write information in the form of web pages and share media items like videos, audios, books etc. Yioop is an open-source web portal with features of a search engine, a wiki system and discussion groups. In this project I have enhanced Yioop’s features for improving the user experiences. The preliminary work introduced new features like emoji picker tool for direct messaging system, unit testing framework for automating the UI testing of Yioop and redeeming advertisement credits back into real money. The major work in the project was to improve and extend the recommendation system of Yioop to recommend media items (referred to resources in Yioop) of wiki pages having different formats like video and text. This was achieved by developing a media job that can gather the description for resources by searching through various configured web search sources using just the name of resources. Then the recommendation media job utilizes these descriptions by applying Hash2Vec term embedding algorithm to generate linear embedding vector for resources and leverage those vectors to generate linear vector for users representing their history of consuming resources. Scores are calculated using cosine similarity between the vector of a user and the embedding vector of resources not consumed by that user, ultimately recommending resources in descending order of this score. Experiments were conducted to compare the results of older and newer version of recommendation systems

Assessing Stress Tolerance of Organelle Small Heat Shock Protein Mutants in Arabidopsis Thaliana

Molecular chaperones are proteins found in virtually every organism and are essential to cell survival. When plants are heat stressed, they upregulate and downregulate multiple genes, many of which are associated with the heat shock response. Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) are one class of molecular chaperones that are upregulated during heat shock. They are proposed to act as the first line of defense by binding to heat sensitive proteins and preventing their irreversible aggregation. However, many details of sHSP function remain to be discovered and exactly what proteins they protect is unresolved. In addition to cytosolic sHSPs found in other organisms, plants also produce sHSPs that are targeted to organelles. In this study, I focus on the mitochondria and chloroplast localizing sHSPs: HSP23.5-MTI/CP, HSP23.6-MTI/CP, HSP25.3-CP, and HSP26.5-MTII in Arabidopsis thaliana. The heat tolerance of knockout mutants of these different organelle-localized sHSPs, including single, double, triple, and quadruple knockouts was assessed through various stress assays. A hypocotyl elongation assay indicated a mild heat sensitive phenotype for many of the sHSP knockout mutants and plants lacking all four sHSPs showed the greatest reduction in hypocotyl elongation following heat stress. In an vi assay with light grown seedlings, I observed plants that lacked the chloroplast-localizing HSP25.3-CP were sensitive to acute heat stress. In stress assays involving arsenic, plants that did not express mitochondrial sHSPs were the most sensitive to excess arsenic. Interestingly, plants lacking the four sHSPs were more resistant to salt and cadmium stress. The phenotypes of these sHSPs will bring us closer to defining their mechanism of action during heat or heavy metal stress and the mutants will provide a platform for further studies of sHSP structure and function

Quantum search at low temperature in the single avoided crossing model

We begin with an n-qubit quantum search algorithm and formulate it in terms of quantum walk and adiabatic quantum computation. We then represent and transform the n-qubit search algorithm into a two-level system and hence the single avoided crossing model. We perform and present the analytical calculations and numerical simulations of the dynamics of quantum walk search algorithm and AQC search algorithm in a thermal bath. We use the master equations formulation to represent the open quantum system. We nd out that while generally the performance of algorithms worsen with increase in temperature and the system size, there are interesting features in quantum walk search where there is an optimal low temperature for the best performance for other specied parameters. Similarly for AQC search, the performance generally worsens with increase in temperature, but for specied parameter ranges, the system is more robust against temperature eects