This thesis summarizes experiments conducted to develop a high sensitivity vector magnetometer using nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in a bulk diamond sample. This project began by analyzing the sensitivity of a single NV orientation using a continuous wave electron spin resonance approach. A protocol for determining the diamond's orientation was developed to map vector magnetic field readings in...

Reverse correlation methods have been widely used in neuroscience for many years and have recently been applied to study the sensitivity of human brain signals (EEG, MEG) to complex visual stimuli. Here we employ one such method, Bubbles (Gosselin, F., Schyns, P.G., 2001. Bubbles: A technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vis. Res. 41, 2261-2271), in conjunction with fM...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for diagnosis of extrapulmonary tuberculosis (ETB), as well as the impact of PCR results on clinical management. MATERIALS AND METHODS We conducted a study of nested PCR tests in 45 patients and a review of patient hospital files, calculating sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negativ...

Space missions require extremely high reliable components that must guarantee correct functionality without incurring in catastrophic effects. When electronic devices are adopted in space applications, radiation hardened technology should be mandatorily adopted. In this paper we propose a novel method for analyzing the sensitivity with respect to Single Event Latch-up (SEL) in radiation hardene...

A higher-order frequency-domain characterization of termite activity (feeding and excavating) has been performed by means of analyzing diagonal slices of the bi-spectrum. Five sets of signals of different qualities were acquired using a high sensitivity probe-accelerometer. We conclude that it is possible to establish a third-order pattern (spectral track) associated to the termite emissions, a...

Carpenter et al. (2013) propose a multiple imputation (MI) approach for analyzing data from clinical trials with protocol deviations. Sensitivity analysis to departures from missing at random (MAR) is widely acknowledged as important, but is poorly handled in practice, so we welcome their detailed proposals. However, here we highlight two problems with their method: an implicit assumption of no...

Data can be analyzed from a data structure that is organized around the relationships that are required to support decisions. This approach is more efficient than analyzing from cartographic data structures. Especially for streams data, the sensitivity to fractal dimension makes direct encoding of analytical relationships more efficient than computation from digital geographic coordinates. Usin...

A rapid method for identification of Beijing lineage Mycobacterium tuberculosis is still needed in regions of tuberculosis endemicity, especially if genotyping methods are not readily accessible. After analyzing 1,557 clinical isolates, a PCR method with combined mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit loci 26, 31, and ETR-A for differentiation of Beijing lineage isolates was established, th...

Synthetic reverberating activity patterns are experimentally generated by stimulation of a subset of neurons embedded in a spontaneously active network of cortical cells in-vitro. The neurons are artificially connected by means of conditional stimulation matrix, forming a synthetic local circuit with a predefined programmable connectivity and time-delays. Possible uses of this experimental desi...

The types and characteristics of noise in chip images were analyzed in this paper. A new kind of details preserving adaptive median filtering algorithm with directional sub-window was introduced in which the shape and size of filtering window can be adjusted according to the noise level and the sensitivity can be set by parameter. The filter can effectively get rid of most of the impulse noise ...