DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF UWB ANTENNA FOR AIR COUPLED GPR APPLICATIONS Report Title This thesis presents a novel antenna structure that satisfies the challenging requirements of an air coupled high speed ground penetrating radar (GPR). The desired GPR system is to achieve high spatial resolution and accurate inspection results while scanning at relatively high speed for highway pavement and br...

Soil pipes are common and important features of many catchments, particularly in semi-arid and humid areas, and can contribute a large proportion of runoff to river systems. They may also significantly influence catchment sediment and solute yield. However, there are often problems in finding and defining soil pipe networks which are located deep below the surface. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR...

BACKGROUND Global postural re-education (GPR) has shown positive results for patients with musculoskeletal disorders, but no previous randomized controlled trial (RCT) has investigated its effectiveness as the sole procedure for adult patients with chronic nonspecific neck pain (NP). OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of applying GPR compared with a manual t...

BACKGROUND In the Global postural re-education (GPR) evaluation, posture alterations are associated with anterior or posterior muscular chain impairments. Our goal was to assess the reliability of the GPR muscular chain evaluation. METHODS DESIGN Inter-rater reliability study. Fifty physical therapists (PTs) and two experts trained in GPR assessed the standing posture from photographs of f...

There is increasing interest in real-time brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for the passive monitoring of human cognitive state, including cognitive workload. Too often, however, effective BCIs based on machine learning techniques may function as "black boxes" that are difficult to analyze or interpret. In an effort toward more interpretable BCIs, we studied a family of N-back working memory tas...

To evaluate the condition of asphalt pavement road, two GPR systems with different frequency band were mounted in the trailer type vehicle. The GPR system with higher frequency band was used to measure the thickness of the asphalt layers and the other system with lower frequency band was used to detect the air cavity located beneath the asphalt pavement.

This paper presents statistical signal processing approaches for clutter reduction in Stepped-Frequency Ground Penetrating Radar (SF-GPR) data. In particular, we suggest clutter/signal separation techniques based on principal and independent component analysis (PCA/ICA). The approaches are successfully evaluated and compared on real SF-GPR time-series. Field-test data are acquired using a monos...

BACKGROUND Simple and inexpensive non-invasive fibrosis tests are highly needed but have been poorly studied in sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS Using liver histology as a gold standard, we developed a novel index using routine laboratory tests to predict significant fibrosis in patients with chronic HBV infection in The Gambia, West Africa. We prospectively assessed the diagnostic accuracy of the...