Event

A Case-Control based Genomic Analysis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a respiratory illness that affects millions of people all over the world. It is a major cause of chronic morbidity and mortality and a serious global public health problem. COPD is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. Although the environmental causes of COPD which predominantly include cigarette smoking are well-documented, to this date the genetic underpinnings of COPD remain largely unknown. Furthermore, in the current landscape of a respiratory pandemic, COPD patients are at a much higher risk for developing other respiratory illnesses and co-morbidities. In this study we use genomic data from…

Risk Factors for Thyroid Cancer, a Systematic Review

Thyroid cancer accounted for 1 out of every 20 female cancer diagnoses worldwide in 2018; the etiology of this disease is not well understood, and preventive programs are not established.  It is well known that thyroid cancer incidence has been increasing since the 1980s, largely attributed to the increase in diagnosis of papillary thyroid cancer and improvements in detection and diagnosis.  Currently, exposure to ionizing radiation is the only well-established risk factor for thyroid cancer.   Literature published in the English language between 1946 and September 2020 was searched via MEDLINE. A building-block strategy was used to identify articles of interest: “thyroid neoplasms”…

FatPlants: A Comprehensive Website Platform of Plant Fat Related Genes, Proteins and Metabolism

Increasing seed oil content by plant breeding has resulted in trade-offs or penalties with respect to protein content, seed size, or seed set. The molecular basis for this impasse is mostly speculative. Use of current global profiling approaches to better understand both the metabolic consequences of higher oil and the basis for reduced yield must also deal with off-target genetic mutations (even in near-isogenic lines), ultimately confounding cause-effect interpretations. We propose a diverse, integrated strategy to study the consequences of higher lipid production by studying transgenic plants specifically engineered to produce higher seed oil. As a part of this collaborative project,…

Cancer Surveillance Informatics – Missouri Cancer Registry and Research Center

Cancer surveillance has to be able to monitor trends of cancer cases, subtypes of cancer, and cancer clusters to inform cancer control and policies related to cancer and cancer care. The increasing complexity and depth of cancer care, treatment, and other elements to describe a cancer case require cancer registries to capture data from a wide variety of sources by utilizing many informatics methods to integrate these data. Current and future developments include automated processing of electronic pathology reports, artificial intelligence, natural language processing NLP, and linkage of data sources to expand surveillance goals. Recent developments include a national virtual…

Development of A Blockchain Framework for Virtual Clinical Trials

Clinical trials are essential for discovering new treatments, but there are multiple challenges to patient recruitment, patient engagement, and cost containment. Virtual clinical trials (VCT) are an innovative approach that provides potential solutions by conducting home-based, rather than site-based, clinical trials. Virtual clinical trials are still the exception rather than general practice due to technical barriers. “Blockchain,” a distributed ledger technology, is a perfect match for virtual clinical trials. Its peer-to-peer design, security settings, and data transparency meet the needs of many healthcare applications. The programmable “Smart Contract” feature makes blockchain more suitable and feasible for VCT by solving computational…

Identifying Patient-specific Flow of Signal Transduction Perturbed by Multiple Single-nucleotide Alterations

Background: Identifying patient-specific flow of signal transduction perturbed by multiple single-nucleotide alterations is critical for improving patient outcomes in cancer cases. However, accurate estimation of mutational effects at the pathway level for such patients remains an open problem. While probabilistic pathway topology methods are gaining interest among the scientific community, the overwhelming majority do not account for network perturbation effects from multiple single-nucleotide alterations.   Methods: Here we present an improvement of the Mutational Forks formalism to infer the patient-specific flow of signal transduction based on multiple single-nucleotide alterations, including non-synonymous and synonymous mutations. The lung adenocarcinoma and skin cutaneous melanoma datasets from…

Analysis of Healthy Coping Feedback Messages from Diabetes Mobile Apps

To analyze Healthy Coping-related feedback messages from diabetes mobile apps against the theoretical framework based on behavioral change theories. We searched apps using the search terms: “diabetes,” “blood sugar,” “glucose,” and “mood” from iTunes and Google Play stores. We entered a range of values on three Healthy Coping domains: 1) diabetes-related measures, 2) physical exercise/activity, and 3) mood to generate feedback messages. We developed behavioral change theory-based framework and analyzed the feedback messages against three dimensions of timing, intention, and content (feedback purpose and feedback response). The feedback purposes were categorized into seven purposes; warning, suggestion, self-monitoring, acknowledging, reinforcement, goal…

Data-Driven Patients Stratification and Drug Repositioning

Cancer is a heterogeneous disease and represents a great example of the need for selecting patient-centric rather than disease-centric treatment. De novo drug discovery is a time-consuming and high-cost process with a low success rate. Drug repositioning (DR) reduces the time, cost, and risk of developing new drugs because it recommends new uses for drugs already declared safe for human use. This study uses a novel data mining approach, exploratory data mining (EDM), and network analysis for patient cohort stratification and DR. This approach enables identifying homogeneous subgroups within a heterogeneous disease population and recommends drugs based on subgroup-specific molecular…

Data Analytics Using the Cerner Real-world COVID-19 Data to Answer Clinical Questions

Cerner Real World data allows researchers and data scientists to explore clinical data via HealtheDataLab. Recently, Cerner granted many of their client institutions access to de-identified patient’s data for COVID-19 research to help fight the pandemic.  The de-identified patient data was dataset contains COVID-19 related encounters, demographics, chronic conditions, medication, and lab results. This large-scale cohort allows for the investigation of the relationships between risk factors, comorbidities, complication and specific outcomes. However, due to variable accuracy and completeness of data, usage of EHR data for research purposes requires an in-depth understanding of potential pitfalls which could lead to inaccurate or unrepresentative…