Health Technology Assessment (HTA) considers the therapeutic effectiveness of a health technology and may also evaluate cost-effectiveness. The aim of this study was to evaluate HTA agencies, their relationship to regulatory authorities and other decision-makers and to identify …
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How are processes working at the individual level, the species level and the macro-ecological level connected? This thesis explores the theoretical and structural constraints on biological evolution. It does this by developing an evolutionary program to model biological form. Th…
The objective was to explore the role of GPR41 (FFAR3) and GPR43 (FFAR2) in colonic physiology and potential involvement in appetite control. The expression of SCFA receptors mRNA across the longitudinal axis of healthy mice, pig and human colon were found to be similar. Immunoh…
Age related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness among the elderly population. It occurs in two forms, a nonexudative "dry" form which can lead to geographic atrophy of the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells in the region of the macula and an exudativ…
This thesis studies algorithms for Distributed Computing. More specifically however the project aimed to carry out research on the performance analysis of mobile robots in a variety of different settings. In a range of different network and geometric settings we investigate effi…
The recent global mean sea level rise is dominated by the addition of water to the oceans, accounting for around two thirds of the increase. In contrast, altimetry trends from 1993 to 2010 reveal that the local trends are dominated by the steric contribution, involving density e…
Doped zinc oxide is of interest as a transparent conductive oxide (TCO), due to the abundance of its major constituents, its low resistivity, high transparency and wide bandgap. The current work focuses on the properties required for TCO applications including resistivity of ≤10…
Hutchinson (1961) first posed the paradox of the plankton: Why do so many phytoplankton species coexist while competing for a limited number of resources? High biodiversity has been explained in terms of the phytoplankton system not reaching an equilibrium state. Spatial and tem…
Regulator of calcineurin 1 (RCAN1) has been shown to act as a negative regulator of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-signalling in endothelial cells. Two isoforms are detectable in cells, RCAN1.1 and RCAN1.4, produced by alternative splicing of the RCAN1 mRNA. In this s…
The objective of this research is to provide a novel approach to improving retrieval performance by exploiting Ontology with the statistical language model (SLM). The proposed methods consist of two major processes, namely ontology-based query expansion (OQE) and ontology-based …
The term glioma encompasses brain tumours arising from the glial cells. Malignant glioma are characterised by a rapid growth rate and high capacity for invasive infiltration to surrounding brain tissue, hence diagnosis and treatment is difficult, and patient survival is poor. Ap…
Synaptic vesicle (SV) exocytosis is vital to maintaining neuronal transmission at chemical synapses and defects in this processes has been linked to various psychiatric and neuronal disorders. Further, distinct modes of exocytosis have been implicated in post-synaptic plasticity…
Thermoacoustic instabilities are a mayor problem in industrial combustors, where they can lead to catastrophic hardware damage. An industrial gas turbine combustion chamber is a very complex and expensive system. Thus, a laboratory burner has been built for research purposes, wh…
In the last decade, miniaturised “lab-on-a-chip” (LOC) devices have attracted significant interest in academia and industry. LOC sensors for electrochemical analysis now commonly reach picomolar in sensitivities, using only microliter-sized samples. One of the major drawbacks of…
Replication of the genome is a central process in cellular life, which must be tightly regulated at the risk of genomic instability. DNA replication has been extensively studied in bacteria and eukaryotes, and recently, in archaea. Universally, DNA replication is started at spec…
The environment in which cells find themselves is a complex, three dimensional one which provides a variety of inputs and cues capable of controlling and guiding cell behaviour. These environmental signals take a fertilised egg through development to become an adult human being …
Previous deception methods exploring the influence of competitors to hide manipulations of feedback have found improvements in performance. They have however, investigated such effects without investigating the mechanisms arising from competitor manipulations. The aim of this th…
The regulation of work-rate during self-paced exercise has become a favoured topic in exercise sciences in the mechanistic investigation of fatigue. Deception has emerged as a common, practical strategy which involves the manipulation of key variables during exercise. The intent…
Introduction: There is a hypothesis that Eye-Hand Coordination (EHC) is a general ability presenting an opportunity to explore it’s mechanisms via a series of innovative studies. The thesis outlines two major aims: 1) to establish reliable measurement techniques and protocols fo…