Browsing by Subject "Quality assurance"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Analytical Chemistry and Quality Assurance Procedures for Natural Water Samples 1994-1995
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 1991) Axler, Richard P; Owen, Christopher J
    One of the fundamental responsibilities of water management is the establishment of continuing programs to insure the reliability and validity of data. Effective research in water pollution and management depends on a valid laboratory data base, which in turn may contribute to sound evaluations of both the progress of the research itself and the viability of available water pollution and management alternatives.
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    Analytical chemistry and quality assurance procedures for natural water, wastewater, and sediment samples, 2015
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 2015-06-01) Ruzycki, Elaine; Henneck, Jerald; Axler, Richard P
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    Standard Operating Procedures (SOP): Aquatic Field Collection Guidelines Habitat Characterization Benthic Sample Processing
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 1999) Breneman, Dan
    Assessing biological condition of aquatic habitats involves multiple phases and a variety of methodologies and techniques. Monitoring, as one form of assessing biological condition includes, but is not limited to, field observations, data and sample collection, laboratory processing, and data interpretation. This document is limited to aquatic biota sampling, characterizing habitat structure, assessing aquatic macrophytes and adjacent riparian condition, and evaluating water quality parameters. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to collect biological samples and evaluate habitat characteristics for interpreting, or continually monitoring, biological condition. Guidelines are provided to establish sample collection protocols once an experimental design is formulated. Descriptions that follow will be limited to habitat characteristic evaluation, monitoring water quality parameters, and fish, macroinvertebrate, and periphyton community sampling.
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    Towards adaptive radiation therapy--a framework for inclusion of organ deformation in adaptive dose delivery
    (2013-12) Varadhan, Nagarajan
    Adaptive Radiation Therapy (ART) can be used as a feedback control strategy to include patient specific variations in planning and delivery of radiation with the ultimate goal of improving the therapeutic ratio. Deformable image registration (DIR) has the potential to include organ deformation in the adaptive dose delivery. Our goal in this dissertation is to develop methods and tools based on scientific insight gained to account organ deformation which can be thought of as a bio-feedback between physics, anatomy & physiology of organs.In this dissertation we first demonstrate the need for ART in the treatment of localized prostate cancer and propose plan adaptation without deformable image registration tools. This dissertation aims to develop tools to independently perform DIR using open source platform (3D Slicer) and propose a frame work to validate the accuracy of DIR with an emphasis on radiation oncology application. A novel method of verifying DIR accuracy using virtually simulated deformation to mimic clinically observed organ deformation was proposed and validated. Independent validation tools for verifying accuracy of image registration are implemented using open source modules.The second step in implementing ART involves calculating the doses to a deforming anatomy. Dose warping defined as applying the deformation vector field (DVF) arising from DIR on the original dose distribution has the potential to account for organ deformation and accumulate doses. However its application and validity in a clinical environment remains controversial. This dissertation proposes to examine the fundamental science of deformation linked to its causative physical force and use that relationship to verify the validity of dose warping from DIR algorithms. A novel deformable bladder phantom made of viscoelastic polymer with mechanical and tensile properties comparable to human bladder was designed for this purpose. A threshold limit for dose warping was ascertained and established from various commercially available DIR algorithms .The applicability of dose warping to dose painting scenarios was investigated. This dissertation also highlights the need to validate the volume of dose from dose warping as traditionally used 3D gamma pass rates used by most research studies may not accurately describe dose warping for dose painting.