Filetype
This thesis examines how young people in Finland make sense of profit-oriented drug selling and construct drug dealer identities. Drug use and related harms have increased globally in recent years. In Finland, an increase in minors selling drugs for financial profit has been noticed by the police and a non-governmental youth work organization Children of the Station. The aim of this thesis is to e
Molecular profiling of extracellular vesicles (EVs) offers novel opportunities for diagnostic applications, but the current major obstacle for clinical translation is the lack of efficient, robust, and reproducible isolation methods. To bridge that gap, we developed a microfluidic, non-contact, and low-input volume compatible acoustic trapping technology for EV isolation that enabled downstream sm
Grunderna i cancerbehandling är kirurgi, strålterapi och behandling med cancerläkemedel, ofta i kombination med varandra. Regimer med cancerläkemedel som definierar det eller de läkemedel som används, deras doser, hur ofta och hur länge de ska ges, har utvecklats och används för olika cancerdiagnoser. Flera professioner inom sjukvården är involverade i behandlingen: läkaren som ordinerar läkemedleThe basics in cancer treatment are surgery, radiation therapy, and treatment with cancer drugs, often combined. Chemotherapy regimens that define the drugs used, the dosage, the frequency and duration of drug administration, have been developed and used for different cancer diagnoses. Several healthcare professionals are involved in the treatment: the physician prescribing the drugs, the pharmacis
Electrification of commercial heavy vehicles has led to the offer of different electric drive-based powertrain architectures, most of them with the adaptation of the diesel engine based architecture. Due to the limited driving range possible, optimal configuration of the powertrain becomes a vital task with the battery as the energy source, which also takes a significant portion of payload capacit
BackgroundLiver metastases are a common consequence of colorectal cancer. When feasible, surgical resection is first-line treatment. Synchronous disease can be treated with different strategies. Traditionally, the primary tumour is resected first followed by resection of the liver metastases (bowel-first). The other option, which is increasing, is the liver-first strategy, where resection of the l
The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that administration of Regenerating islet-derived protein 3α (Reg3α), a protein described as having protective effects against oxidative stress and anti-inflammatory activity, could participate in the control of glucose homeostasis and potentially be a new target of interest in the treatment of type 2 diabetes. To that end the recombinant human Reg3α
Sustainable development goals assume that basic notions such as health, life and water can be universally and easily expressed and understood across diverse communities and stakeholders. Yet there is growing evidence pointing to considerable semantic diversity in how humans represent the world in language. In this paper I discuss such semantic diversity in the context of key notions of sustainabil
Introduction: Thrombocytopenia is frequent in intensive care unit (ICU) patients and has been associated with worse outcome. Platelet transfusions are often used in the management of ICU patients with severe thrombocytopenia. However, the reported frequencies of thrombocytopenia and platelet transfusion practices in the ICU vary considerably. Therefore, we aim to provide contemporary epidemiologic
Background: Minimally invasive cardiac surgery provokes substantial pain and therefore analgesic consumption. The effect of fascial plane blocks on analgesic efficacy and overall patient satisfaction remains unclear. We therefore tested the primary hypothesis that fascial plane blocks improve overall benefit analgesia score (OBAS) during the initial 3 days after robotically assisted mitral valve r
Objective: To investigate the impact of including fluorine-18 fludeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) scanning in the planning of paediatric radiotherapy (RT). Methods: Target volumes were first delineated without and subsequently re-delineated with access to 18F-FDG PET scan information, on duplicate CT sets. RT plans were generated for three-dimensional conformal photon RT (
In this paper we present methods for triangulation of infinite cylinders from image line silhouettes. We show numerically that linear estimation of a general quadric surface is inherently a badly posed problem. Instead we propose to constrain the conic section to a circle, and give algebraic constraints on the dual conic, that models this manifold. Using these constraints we derive a fast minimal
Background: OpenSim models are typically based on cadaver findings that are generalized to represent a wide range of populations, which curbs their validity. Patient-specific modelling through incorporating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) improves the model's biofidelity with respect to joint alignment and articulations, muscle wrapping, and ligament insertions. The purpose of this study was to d
This paper develops a novel sparse direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation technique that avoids the common requirement of hyperparameters, which are typically difficult to set suitably in practice. Using the presented minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation framework, we propose a computationally efficient super-resolution DOA estimator that is implemented using an alternate updating of the spa
An appropriate and stable indoor climate in museums is crucial to guarantee an appropriate preservation of our cultural heritage. Depending on the collection, indoor temperature and relative humidity need to be kept within a certain range. Fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity could cause damage to museum artefacts and may require higher energy needs than necessary. Biochar is a materi
The performance of HVAC equipment, including chillers, is continuing to be pushed to theoretical limits, which impacts the necessity for advanced control logic to operate them efficiently and robustly. At the same time, their architectures are becoming more complex; many systems have multiple compressors, expansion devices, evaporators, circuits, or other elements that challenge control design and
In this work, a computationally efficient evolutionary algorithm is proposed for estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) of coherently distributed (CD) sources corrupted by additive impulsive noise. The typical method, such as distributed signal parameter estimation (DSPE) method, requires a 2-D spectral peak search and cannot allow for coherent signals. The proposed method in this article uses
One of the major challenges in forensic genetics is being able to detect very small amounts of DNA. Massively parallel sequencing (MPS) enables sensitive detection; however, genotype errors may exist and could interfere with the interpretation. Common errors in MPS-based analysis are often induced during PCR or sequencing. Unique molecular indices (UMIs) are short random nucleotide sequences ligat
This paper addresses the hybrid quantized signal detection problem in a distributed radar system, where widely separated antennas transmit low-bit quantized data with varying quantization levels depending on the different bandwidth constraint for each channel to a fusion center. To enable a high detection performance with such hybrid quantized data, we formulate the generalized likelihood ratio, R
Deep learning has shown promise for gaze estimation in Virtual Reality (VR) and other head-mounted applications, but such models are hard to train due to lack of available data. Here we introduce a novel method to train neural networks for gaze estimation using synthetic images that model the light distributions captured in a P-CR setup. We tested our model on a dataset of real eye images from a V
