Projects
Cognitive Functional Therapy in nurses with persistent low back pain: an intervention based on an individualised multidimensional evaluation KU Leuven
Nurses perform essential healthcare tasks within our healthcare system and adequate nursing health is crucial for the provision of effective, empathic and efficient health care. However, occupational Low Back Pain (LBP) is very common among nurses. Lifetime prevalence ranges from 35 to 84% and annual prevalence is approximately 70%. LBP is worldwide the leading cause of disability and has a significant personal, social and economic impact. ...
Socio-eco-evolutionary dynamics in Coupled Human and Natural Systems - interactive effects of anthropogenic stressors on the evolution of freshwater species and the socio-ecological consequences Vrije Universiteit Brussel
BAPTON - Biology Adaptive for Proton Therapy in Oesophageal caNcer KU Leuven
More than half of the patients treated for cancer receive external Beam Radiation Therapy (EBRT) during the course of their disease. EBRT is typically characterized by highly standardized protocols and relies on the precise daily delivery of high energy X-rays combined with volumetric imaging tools. In order to further improve cancer care in Belgium, the UZ Leuven and the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc have recently built in partnership ...
Impact evaluation of the development education program of G3W-M3M, SOLIDAGRO, and KIYO: 'mobilizing young people around the right to health, food and children's rights' KU Leuven
This project concerns the implementation of an impact assessment of the ‘Youth Engagement’ component within the development education program of the Consortium G3W-M3M, Solidagro, and KIYO. This impact assessment includes three measurement points: baseline, mid-term review and final measurement. Besides assessing the project’s impact the evaluation also seeks to carry out an in-depth analysis of the programme’s contribution towards this ...
Multimodal Signal Analysis for Unobtrusive Characterization of Obstructive Sleep Apnea KU Leuven
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most prevalent sleep related breathing disorder, nevertheless subjects suffering from it often remain undiagnosed due to the cumbersome diagnosis procedure. Moreover, the prevalence of OSA is increasing and a better phenotyping of patients is needed in order to prioritize treatment. The goal of this thesis was to tackle those challenges in OSA diagnosis, by means of advanced signal processing algorithms, ...
Bridging the Image and Text Spaces with Neural Network Methods for Multimodal Representation Learning and Spatial Understanding KU Leuven
In the recent years, the emergence of deep learning models has greatly advanced computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). These models allow producing feature representations for images and words. For example, convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Mikolov’s et al. skip-gram model are popular means to extract such features from images and text corpora respectively. These representations are typically employed either in concept ...
Ecology, systematics and evolutionary biology of frog blood parasites in northern KwaZulu-Natal KU Leuven
Blood parasites have been recorded in a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts, inhabiting both aquatic and terrestrial environments. Until this study, only a few blood parasite surveys had been carried out on frogs in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus information on the diversity of these parasites remained limited. To increase our knowledge of frog blood parasites, a large multi-approach study on the diversity, evolutionary biology, and ...
Therapeutic potential of high-density lipoproteins in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction KU Leuven
Plasma high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels and plasma levels of its major apolipoprotein (apo), apo A-I, are inversely correlated with the incidence of coronary heart disease. The potential protection conferred by HDL against ischemic cardiovascular diseases has been most often attributed to its role in reverse cholesterol transport. However, HDLs exert divergent functions that include actions mediated by signalling via ...
Multi-scale monitoring and modelling for the analysis of the hydrologic response of southern Ecuadorian Andean páramos KU Leuven
The present research is focused on an “alpine” Neotropical grassland ecosystem, situated between ca. 3500 and 4500 m a.s.l. –locally known as “páramo”– which covers the Andean mountains. Below the páramo, the study area hosts other types of high-altitude Andean ecosystems, such as: tropical montane cloud forest and grasslands. The study area is located in the south-west highlands of the Paute River basin that drains to the Amazon River. These ...