Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Pink Survival Porn and its Malcontents: Visual Breast Cancer Narratives in Contemporary American Media(2020) Flanigan, Lauren Nicole; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The biggest problem with American depictions of breast cancer survivors in contemporary media is that they’re too pink, i.e. they represent the cheerful image of a white, heteronormative, cis-gendered woman of upper-to-middle-class means who easily overcomes her disease. Such patient depictions in photographic portraits, graphic novels, and television (ad campaigns or fictional episodes) suggest that only women who adhere to white feminine gender codes and sexual aesthetics can achieve survival. Meanwhile, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and poor patients disproportionately die from breast cancer due to inaccessible or unequal care related to their lack of media representation as bodies that matter. Their truths are glossed over in the fantasy of what I call survival porn, which coopts and genericizes individual cancer experiences into a pink consumer kumbaya that benefits corporations rather than their disease-ridden constituents. This dissertation therefore examines the historical origins of pink ribbon culture, feminist health movements, and their visual entanglement with optimistic, white media metanarratives to determine why and how certain “survivors” become indoctrinated into sheroic narratives of overcoming the disease while “others” are written out of the picture altogether. Successful survivors are shown self-fashioning their personas in accordance with white, heteronormative standards of femininity judged appropriated by patriarchal medicine and cosmetic magnates. Counternarratives focusing on gender-bending these disease expectations, however, begin to chip away at the veneer of aesthetic survival, rescripting illness identities to be more inclusive of those on the fringes, for example: men, lesbians, and women of color; individuals whose inclusion within survival narratives help uncover causal determinants of breast cancer, like environmental toxins. My analysis of these personal, more plural narratives create space in the dominant, pink visual discourse for non-white and gender-fluid folx who likewise deserve to live a considered life, as defined by Audre Lorde in her Cancer Journals. Whether living with or meeting their ends from breast cancer, my academic inquiry into survival ultimately calls for an ethic of pragmatic optimism and authentic corporeal representation to allow patients with various diseases and disabilities, regardless of age, class, gender, race, or sexual orientation, to ensure greater health equity and quality of care in the United States.Item Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Teleoperated Master-Slave Surgical System for Breast Biopsy under Continuous MRI Guidance(2013) Yang, Bo; Desai, Jaydev P.; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this project is to design and develop a teleoperated master-slave surgical system that can potentially assist the physician in performing breast biopsy with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatible robotic system. MRI provides superior soft-tissue contrast compared to other imaging modalities such as computed tomography or ultrasound and is used for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. The strong magnetic field and the limited space inside the MRI bore, however, restrict direct means of breast biopsy while performing real-time imaging. Therefore, current breast biopsy procedures employ a blind targeting approach based on magnetic resonance (MR) images obtained a priori. Due to possible patient involuntary motion or inaccurate insertion through the registration grid, such approach could lead to tool tip positioning errors thereby affecting diagnostic accuracy and leading to a long and painful process, if repeated procedures are required. Hence, it is desired to develop the aforementioned teleoperation system to take advantages of real-time MR imaging and avoid multiple biopsy needle insertions, improving the procedure accuracy as well as reducing the sampling errors. The design, implementation, and evaluation of the teleoperation system is presented in this dissertation. A MRI-compatible slave robot is implemented, which consists of a 1 degree of freedom (DOF) needle driver, a 3-DOF parallel mechanism, and a 2-DOF X-Y stage. This slave robot is actuated with pneumatic cylinders through long transmission lines except the 1-DOF needle driver is actuated with a piezo motor. Pneumatic actuation through long transmission lines is then investigated using proportional pressure valves and controllers based on sliding mode control are presented. A dedicated master robot is also developed, and the kinematic map between the master and the slave robot is established. The two robots are integrated into a teleoperation system and a graphical user interface is developed to provide visual feedback to the physician. MRI experiment shows that the slave robot is MRI-compatible, and the ex vivo test shows over 85%success rate in targeting with the MRI-compatible robotic system. The success in performing in vivo animal experiments further confirm the potential of further developing the proposed robotic system for clinical applications.Item On Chip Isolation and Enrichment of Tumor Initiating Cells(2012) Saadin, Katayoon; White, Ian M; Chemical Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We report for the first time a microdevice that enables the selective enrichment and culture of breast cancer stem cells using the principles of mammosphere culture. For nearly a decade, researchers have identified breast cancer stem cells within heterogeneous populations of cells by utilizing low-attachment serum-free culture conditions, which lead to the formation of spheroidal colonies (mammospheres) that are enriched for cancer stem cells. While this assay has proven to be useful for identifying cancer stem cells from a bulk population, ultimately its utility is limited by difficulties in combining the mammosphere technique with other useful cellular and molecular analyses. However, integrating the mammosphere technique into a microsystem can enable it to be combined directly with a number of functions, including cell sorting and analysis, as well as popular molecular assays. In this work, we demonstrate mammosphere culture within a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microsystem. We first prove that hydrophobic PDMS surfaces are as effective as commercial low-attachment plates at selectively promoting the formation of mammospheres. We then demonstrate the culture of mammospheres as large as 0.25 mm within a PDMS microsystem. Finally, we verify that reagents can be delivered to the cell culture wells exclusively by diffusion-based transport, which is necessary because the cells are unattached. This microsystem component can be integrated with other microfluidic functions, such as cell separation, sorting, and recovery, as well as molecular assays, to enable new discoveries in the biology of cancer stem cells that are not possible today.