Library: Health Sciences

Human Papillomavirus has emerged as a distinct cause of cervical changes in young women. Its prevalence is continuously growing and is considered at epidemic proportions with 20 million Americans already infected and 5.5 million new cases reported annually. (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Tracking the Hidden Epidemics., Trends in STDs in the U.S. 2000, Atlanta, Georgia, 2000) There are known risk factors associated with HPV cervical changes and cervical cancer. These known risk factors are the number of one’s sexual partners, age at first coitus, smoking and use of oral contrac...

Recently, endurance athletes and high altitude climbers have gained access to commercially available, portable normobaric hypoxic chambers. Intermittent exposures to hypoxia in these chambers may elicit adaptations similar to those observed during acclimatization to altitude. Manufactures of these systems purport that intermittent exposures may elicit adaptations similar to those observed in response to the hypoxia of high altitude, however there have been no reports in the scientific literature that ventilatory acclimatization or alterations in cerebrovascular dynamics occur following repeate...

That neuropsychological performance is impaired in patients with affective disorders is now widely accepted, and there is growing evidence that attentional dysfunction (effortful attention in particular) is one of the major impairments normally observed. The present study aimed at defining the nature of attentional dysfunction in depression by means of tests designed to measure specific aspects of attention, such as sustained, selective, focused, divided attention, etc. We also tested the effect of increasing effortful attentional demands on subjects' performance. To that end, effort level was...

This thesis is dedicated to assess the accuracy of logistic regression (LR) and artificial neural networks (ANN) in the diagnosis of calvarial lesions using computed tomography (CT). The importance of the different features needed for the diagnosis in both models is also analyzed. The models were developed using patients with calvarial lesions as the only known disease were enrolled. All patients were studied with plain films and CT. Other imaging thecniques were used when available. The clinical and CT data were used for developing LR and ANN models. Both models were tested with the jac...