VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Conservative versus Usual Intrapartum Fluid Management for Low Risk Women with Epidural Analgesia on Newborn Weight Loss in Breastfed Infants

There is uncertainty regarding how much intravenous fluid should be given to women in the intrapartum period. There are no published protocols or guidelines available to address fluid management in labour to optimize care for women and their infants. The absence of an evidence-based approach to intrapartum fluid management may result in fluid overload, with consequent maternal and newborn morbidity. The FILL Trial sought to answer the question, for low risk women receiving epidural analgesia in labour, ‘what is the effect of a conservative protocol for fluid management versus usual care on breastfed newborns’ weight loss prior to hospital discharge? The FILL Trial was a single site randomized controlled trial comparing a conservative protocol of fluid management with usual care for low risk women receiving epidural analgesia in labour. Women in the conservative care group received an IV volume prior to epidural analgesia initiation of < 500 ml and an IV infusion rate of 110 ml per hour. Women in the usual care group received an IV volume prior to epidural analgesia initiation of >500 ml and an IV infusion rate of 200 ml per hour. The primary outcome of interest was the proportion of breastfed infants who lost > 7% of their birth weight prior to discharge. Two hundred women participated, 100 in the conservative care group and 100 in the usual care group. Forty-four infants in the conservative care group and 48 infants in the usual care group lost > 7% of their birth weight, p=0.57. There were no statistically significant differences between groups for breastfeeding outcomes or measures of newborn well being. More babies in the conservative care group required initial admission to the neonatal intensive care unit for septic work up for maternal fever. No septic work ups of the babies yielded positive results. More instrumental vaginal deliveries occurred in the conservative care group. No change in current practice is warranted for intrapartum intravenous fluid volumes < 2500 ml. Future research should focus on the creation of more evidence regarding safe volumes of intravenous fluid during labour.

Keywords: intrapartum, labour, breastfeeding, newborn weight loss, epidural analgesia
Advisor: Hodnett, Ellen
On Blowup of Nonlinear Heat Equation in One Dimension

We study blowup of solutions of one-dimensional nonlinear heat equations (NLH). We consider two cases: a power nonlinearity and initial conditions having two equal absolute maxima and a polynomial nonlinearity and initial conditions having a single global maximum. We show in both cases that for a certain open set of initial conditions solutions of the NLH blow up in finite time and we find asymptotical behavior of blowup frofiles. In the first case the blowup occurs at two points while in the second case, at one point.

Keywords: Blowup
Nonlinear heat equation
Advisor: Sigal, Israel Michael
Mary, Pugh
Development and Characterization of a Liposome Imaging Agent

Applied cancer research is heavily focused on the development of diagnostic tools with high sensitivity and specificity that are able to accurately detect the presence and anatomical location of neoplastic cells, as well as therapeutic strategies that are effective at curing or controlling the disease while being minimally invasive and having negligible side effects. Recently, much effort has been placed on the development of nanoparticles as diagnostic imaging and therapeutic agents, and several of these nanoplatforms have been successfully adopted in both the research and clinical arenas. This thesis describes the development of a nanoparticulate liposome system for use in a number of applications including multimodality imaging with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR), longitudinal vascular imaging, image-based biodistribution assessment, and CT detection of neoplastic and inflammatory lesions. Extensive in vitro and in vivo characterization was performed to determine the physico-chemical properties of the liposome agent, including its size, morphology, stability and agent loading, as well as its pharmacokinetics, biodistribution, tumor targeting and imaging performance. Emphasis was placed on the in vivo CT-based quantification of liposome accumulation and clearance from healthy and tumor tissues in a VX2 carcinoma rabbit model, gaining insight not only on the spatial but also the temporal biodistribution of the agent. The thesis concludes with a report that describes the performance of liposomes and CT imaging to detect and localize tumor and inflammatory lesions as compared to that of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) – positron emission tomography (PET). The outcome of the study suggests that liposome-CT could be employed as a competitive method for whole body image-based disease detection and localization. Overall, this work demonstrated that this liposome agent along with quantitative imaging systems and analysis tools, has the potential to positively impact cancer treatment outcome through improved diagnosis and staging, as well as enable personalization of treatment delivery via target delineation. However, in order to prove clinical benefit, steps must be taken to advance this agent through the regulatory stages and obtain approval for its use in humans. Ultimately, the clinical adoption of this multifunctional agent may offer improvements for disease detection, spatial delineation and therapy guidance.

Keywords: Imaging
Liposome
Computed Tomography
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Contrast Agent
Nanoparticle
Advisor: Jaffray, David A.
A Social Semantic Web System for Coordinating Communication in the Architecture, Engineering & Construction Industry

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. In order to maintain their competence in a highly competitive environment and a globalized market, many organizations in the AEC industry have aimed at a move towards the development of learning organizations. Knowledge management has been seen as an effective way to have every member of an organization engaged in learning at all levels. At the very centre of knowledge management and learning is knowledge sharing through effective communication. Unfortunately, however, there is a big gap in the AEC industry between existing practice and the ideal in this area. In order to effectively coordinate information and knowledge flow in the AEC industry, this present research has developed a framework for an information system – a Construction Information and Knowledge Protocol/Portal (CIKP) which integrates within it a publish/subscribe system, Semantic Web technology, and Social Web concepts. Publish/subscribe is an appropriate many-to-many, people-to-people communication paradigm for handling a highly fragmented industry such as construction. In order to enrich the expressiveness of publications and subscriptions, Semantic Web technology has been incorporated into this system through the development of ontologies as a formal and interoperable form of knowledge representation. This research first involved the development of a domain-level ontology (AR-Onto) to encapsulate knowledge about actors, roles, and their attributes in the AEC industry. AR-Onto was then extended and tailored to create an application-level ontology (CIKP-Onto) which has been used to support the semantics in the CIKP framework. Social Web concepts have been introduced to enrich the description of publications and subscriptions. Our aim has been to break down linear communication through social involvement and encourage a culture of sharing, and in the end, the CIKP framework has been developed to specify desired services in communicating information and knowledge, applicable technical approaches, and more importantly, the functions required to satisfy the needs of a variety of service scenarios.

Keywords: Semantic Web
Social Web
Publish/Subscribe Systems
Construction
Architecture
Engineering
Communication
Ontology
AEC Industry
Social Semantic Web
Advisor: El-Diraby, Tamer
Visual Discrimination of Speed-accuracy Tradeoffs

Although research has highlighted the importance of decisions when learning and performing motor actions, few studies have focused on individuals’ ability to choose between potential motor actions. To help bridge this gap, this thesis presents a series of studies that investigate the behaviour of able-bodied individuals when attempting to choose movements based on a speed-accuracy tradeoff. In the first study, a two-alternative forced-choice task was used to determine whether people are consistent with Fitts’s law when choosing the movement they perceive to require the least movement duration. Participants performed almost perfectly when clear visual cues were available—when one of the targets was closer, wider, or both. Contrary to Fitts’s law, however, participants showed a preference for closer targets when visual cues were not informative—when one of the targets was closer and narrower. This study demonstrates that motor decisions are not always optimal, especially when participants are naïve at the task. To determine the basis of individuals’ preference for closer targets, a pair of studies explored the relation between motor decisions, imagined movements, and visual perception. Participants showed a similar deviation from Fitts’s law when imagining movements—believing that movement duration increased with distance within the same index of difficulty. Participants did not behave similarly, however, in a perceptual version of the decision task. These results suggest that imagined movements and motor decisions are linked, but they are not always based on veridical representations of actual movement. To further probe the origin of individuals’ erroneous belief about movement duration, the final study of this thesis measured movement duration for movements made at speeds other than ‘as fast as possible’. Movements made at more natural movement speeds shared important similarities with decisions and imagined movements. This study suggests that the biases seen in naïve motor decisions might originate from participants considering movements for which they have more experience, such as target-directed movements made at a naturally-selected pace. Together, the findings presented in this thesis may help to identify the ways that motor decisions can deviate from optimal, suggesting how those decisions must change with practice to better accomplish a task.

Keywords: human
adult
motor control
choice behaviour
motor skills
human movement
imagination
motor imagery
goal-directed action
speed-accuracy trade-off
Fitts's law
instructions
Advisor: Chau, Tom
Pratt, Jay
Evolving Starburst Model of FIR/sub-mm/mm Line Emission and Its Applications to M82 and Nearby Luminous Infrared Galaxies

This thesis presents a starburst model for far-infrared/sub-millimeter/millimeter (FIR/sub-mm/ mm) line emission of molecular and atomic gas in an evolving starburst region, which is treated as an ensemble of non-interacting hot bubbles which drive spherical shells of swept-up gas into a surrounding uniform gas medium. These bubbles and shells are driven by winds and supernovae within massive star clusters formed during an instantaneous starburst. The underlying stellar radiation from the evolving clusters affects the properties and structure of photodissociation regions (PDRs) in the shells, and hence the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the molecular and atomic line emission from these swept-up shells and the associated parent giant molecular clouds (GMCs) contains a signature of the stage evolution of the starburst. The physical and chemical properties of the shells and their structure are computed using a a simple well known similarity solution for the shell expansion, a stellar population synthesis code, and a time-dependent PDR chemistry model. The SEDs for several molecular and atomic lines (12CO and its isotope 13CO, HCN, HCO+, C, O, and C +) are computed using a non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) line radiative transfer model. By comparing our models with the available observed data of nearby infrared bright galaxies, especially M 82, we constrain the models and in the case of M 82, provide estimates for the age of the recent starburst activity. We also derive the total H2 gas mass in the measured regions of the central 1 kpc starburst disk of M 82. In addition, we apply the model to represent various stages of starburst evolution in a well known sample of nearby luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs). In this way, we interpret the relationship between the degree of molecular excitation and ratio of FIR to CO luminosity to possibly reflect different stages of the evolution of star-forming activity within their nuclear regions. We conclude with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to dating starbursts, and suggest future work for improving the model.

Keywords: Evolving Starburst Model
FIR/Sub-mm/mm Line Emission
Starburst Galaxies
Interstellar Medium
Star Formation History
Giant Molecular Clouds
Star Clusters
Advisor: Seaquist, Ernie R.
Oscillatory Activity in the basal ganglia of Patients with Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a movement disorder that is of basal ganglia origin. It is characterized by a severe loss of dopaminergic input to the striatum and symptoms such as bradykinesia, rigidity and tremor. There is growing evidence that PD is associated with pathological synchronous oscillatory activity in the basal ganglia, which primarily occurs in the 11-30 Hz range, the so-called beta band. The aim of this project was to better understand the oscillatory activity recorded from the basal ganglia of PD patients and to elucidate the significance of this activity in PD. To do this, neuronal firing and local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and globus pallidus internus (GPi) of PD patients undergoing stereotactic neurosurgery for implantation of therapeutic deep brain stimulation electrodes. Beta oscillatory LFP activity in the STN and GPi was found to be coherent with, and reflect to a certain degree, rhythmic activity in a population of local neurons. I have demonstrated for the first time that the degree of beta oscillatory firing in the STN, which is maximal in the motor portion, correlates with the patients’ benefit from dopaminergic medications, but not with baseline motor deficits. My study has also established that beta oscillatory firing in the STN does not positively correlate with the patients’ tremor scores and that during periods of tremor patients tend to have less beta oscillatory firing and increased neuronal oscillatory firing at the tremor frequency. Temporal examination of the LFPs recorded during periods of intermittent resting tremor revealed that stronger tremor is associated with increased LFP power in the low gamma range (35-55 Hz) and there is a decrease in the ratio of beta to gamma coherence. Similarly, a change in balance between oscillatory activities was observed during levodopa-induced dyskinesias. Finally, when the oscillatory activity in the GPi of PD patients was compared to that in dystonia I found that in dystonia, oscillatory LFP activity is less likely to reflect the neuronal firing. These findings indicate that beta oscillatory activity in the basal ganglia might reflect the degree of dopamine deficiency in the striatum and that the relative strength of oscillatory rhythms may play an important role in mediating the pathological features in PD.

Keywords: oscillations
basal ganglia
Parkinson's disease
human
electrophysiology
Advisor: Dostrovsky, Jonathan O.
DIispersion of Cellulose Nanofibers in Biopolymer Based Nanocomposites

The focus of this work was to understand the fundamental dispersion mechanism of cellulose based nanofibers in bionanocomposites. The cellulose nanofibers were extracted from soybean pod and hemp fibers by chemo-mechanical treatments. These are bundles of cellulose nanofibers with a diameter ranging between 50 to 100 nm and lengths of thousands of nanometers which results in very high aspect ratio. In combination with a suitable matrix polymer, cellulose nanofiber networks show considerable potential as an effective reinforcement for high quality specialty applications of bio-based nanocomposites. Cellulose fibrils have a high density of –OH groups on the surface, which have a tendency to form hydrogen bonds with adjacent fibrils, reducing interaction with the surrounding matrix. The use of nanofibers has been mostly restricted to water soluble polymers. This thesis is focused on synthesizing the nanocomposite using a solid phase matrix polypropylene (PP) or polyethylene (PE) by hot compression and poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) in an aqueous phase by film casting. The mechanical properties of nanofiber reinforced PVA film demonstrated a 4-5 fold increase in tensile strength, as compared to the untreated fiber-blend-PVA film. It is necessary to reduce the entanglement of the fibrils and improve their dispersion in the matrix by surface modification of fibers without deteriorating their reinforcing capability. Inverse gas chromatography (IGC) was used to explore how various surface treatments would change the dispersion component of surface energy and acid-base character of cellulose nanofibers and the effect of the incorporation of these modified nanofibers into a biopolymer matrix on the properties of their nano-composites. Poly (lactic acid) (PLA) and polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) based nanocomposites using cellulose nanofibers were prepared by extrusion, injection molding and hot compression. The IGC results indicated that styrene maleic anhydride coated and ethylene-acrylic acid coated fibers improved their potential to interact with both acidic and basic resins. From transmission electron micrograph, it was shown that the nanofibers were partially dispersed in the polymer matrix. The mechanical properties of the nanocomposites were lower than those predicted by theoretical calculations for both nanofiber reinforced biopolymers.

Keywords: nanocomposite
biopolymer
Advisor: Sain, Mohini
Defying the Odds: Similarity and Difference in Canadian Elementary and Secondary Education

This dissertation explains why and how, in the absence of direct federal participation, the Canadian provinces invest at comparable levels, achieve similar outcomes, and produce similar policies while simultaneously maintaining distinctive policy particularities in the elementary and secondary education sector. Given the limited national direction and the extensive autonomy afforded the Canadian provinces, for both students of federalism and education policy, the significant interprovincial similarities appearing across the subnational education sectors are a puzzle to be explained. I develop this analysis by exploring my puzzle in two comparative contexts: cross-nationally and longitudinally. To account for patterns of educational policy similarity and difference, the dissertation points to the movement of policy ideas across the provinces in response to their increasing legal, economic, organizational, and cultural interconnectedness. My dissertation argues that as interconnections among the provinces increased, the movement of policy ideas across the provinces intensified. As policy ideas moved, provincial governments would determine whether a policy from another jurisdiction could be suitable in their own. The subsequent decision to adopt the policy of another turned critically on both the existing relations between the jurisdictions and viability of the new idea within the internal policy context of the receiving jurisdiction. The basic conclusion of my work is that despite Canada’s highly decentralized federalism, there is a remarkable degree of convergence and similarity among the education sectors of the Canadian provinces.

Keywords: federalism
public policy
Canada
education
Advisor: Simeon, Richard
Development of the Mouse Notochord

During development of the vertebrate embryo, a highly conserved tissue called the organizer forms during gastrulation, and is required for establishment of the basic body plan. In mouse, the organizer gives rise to the node and notochord, which are both transient signaling centres involved in patterning the body axes. The genetic regulation and morphogenesis of these tissues, particularly in the mouse, is not well understood. To follow the formation of these tissues we used time-lapse live imaging together with conventional cell lineage tracking. This showed that the notochord has distinct morphogenetic origins along the anterior-posterior axis: anterior head process forms by condensation of dispersed midline organizer cells; trunk forms by convergent extension of node cells; tail forms from posteriorly migrating node cells—this challenges the previously accepted model that tail notochord forms by node regression. We have also found there are distinct genetic requirements within these different regions. Previous mouse mutant analysis showed that conserved transcription factors Foxa2 and Noto are required for either all notochord regions or just tail notochord, respectively. We found a novel genetic interaction between the two demonstrated Foxa2 compensates for Noto specifically in the trunk notochord. Furthermore, we found Noto has a conserved role in regulating axial (notochord) versus paraxial (somite) cell fate. Therefore, we proposed there are three distinct regions within the mouse notochord, each with its own unique morphogenetic origins and genetic control. We have also conducted two microarray-based screens to identify novel gene expression patterns in the node and notochord. First, we compared Foxa2 mutant and wild type gastrula embryos. Second, we isolated notochord progenitors from early somite stage embryos. Extensive in situ hybridization screening based on both data sets revealed over 50 node and notochord expression patterns. Lastly, we screened Foxa2-bound chromatin regions near these notochord-specific genes using a transient zebrafish expression assay, and identified two novel notochord cis-regulatory modules. Together, we found a combination of classical genetics, embryology, and novel imaging techniques, has given us a better understanding of the morphogenesis and genetic regulation of pattern formation in the developing mouse embryo.

Keywords: developmental biology
embryology
mouse
notochord
Advisor: Rossant, Janet