July 25, 2022

MUIDSI Comprehensive Exam — Measuring Geodiversity in Remotely-Sensed Imagery: Deep Spatial Change Detection Methods for Dataset Bias Mitigation and Visual Landscape Characterization

Amid explosive growth in availability of multimodal remotely sensed imagery (RSI) data from a constellation of overhead sensors, a lack of understanding persists concerning the actual content of these data sources, in particular the nature of spatial variation in the visual and contextual features in the landscape being imaged. Whether described as spatial domain shift, geographic feature variance or simply geodiversity, this gap of knowledge about RSI dataset content comes with important implications.  On one hand, there is a lack of tools to evaluate heterogeneity and representativeness of objects classes found in labeled RSI training datasets, in particular methods for regional…

July 21, 2022

2022 Mizzou Faculty Alumni Awards – Notable Presence from MUIDSI

The 67th Annual Faculty Alumni Awardees were announced  on July 20, 2022.  Dr. Chi-Ren Shyu, MU IDSI Director; Dr. Lori Popejoy, MU IDSI Core Faculty and Interim Dean of Sinclair School of Nursing; and Dr. Dr. Stevan Whitt, Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs of Medicine and MU IDSI’s long term physician collaborator, were among the six faculty awardees this year.  According to Mizzou Alumni Association, “First celebrated in 1968, the Faculty Alumni Awards highlight the contributions of exceptional individuals to the University’s growth and core mission, through their professional accomplishments, teaching and research excellence or service to the institution.” To…

July 5, 2022

Dr. Popejoy leads MU Sinclair School of Nursing as Interim Dean

Click to read more.

May 19, 2022

GIScience as an Interdisciplinary Bridge in Indigenous Health Equity 

GIS and geographic theories can help bridge a crucial gap in interdisciplinary research projects. Geography is uniquely poised to offer critical and practical analytical support, wrangle spatial data and relate them to other datasets, and ground community-based science within the communities it aims to serve. In the context of the Navajo Nation, a key concern is relating potential exposure to environmental contaminants with cultural identity and the social ramifications of resource extraction. Daniel Beene (DaRBeene@salud.unm.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and a trainee with the METALS (Metals Exposure…

May 3, 2022

Dr. Blake Meyers Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Dr. Blake Meyers, MUIDSI Informatics PhD program Core Faculty and Professor in the Division of Plant Science and Technology, and jointly appointed as a Principal Investigator and Member of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, has been elected as a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  https://www.danforthcenter.org/news/blake-meyers-elected-to-national-academy-of-sciences/

May 3, 2022

Impact of diabetes status and other factors on risk for thrombotic and thromboembolic events: A multicenter, retrospective analysis using the Cerner Real-World DataTM de-identified COVID-19 cohort 

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a proinflammatory condition that can impact the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems, thereby increasing risk for thrombotic and thromboembolic events (TTE). However, little is known about the impact of diabetes status on risk for TTEs during SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this US-based, multicenter retrospective cohort study, we analyze the impact of diabetes status (i.e., diabetes present vs. diabetes absent; Type 1 diabetes versus Type 2 diabetes), race and ethnicity, sex, and other factors on risk for TTEs in adults with suspected and confirmed COVID-19 infection. After using multivariate…

April 27, 2022

AMIA Informatics Summit Best Student Paper Award

By Karly Balslew On March 21st, doctoral student Humayera Islam won the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Student Paper Competition award for the 2022 AMIA Informatics Summit that was held in Chicago. “It’s one of the biggest platforms for informatics people,” Islam said. “It’s very a very diverse and multidisciplinary platform where anybody that works in this area (informatics) can show their work.”  Students from across the country submitted papers for AMIA 2022 Informatics Summit. Submitted papers then went through a peer-review process before judges selected the top five best papers. These top five were chosen to compete in the…

April 26, 2022

Analysis of polygenic selection in purebred and crossbred pig genomes using Generation Proxy Selection Mapping

Background Artificial selection on quantitative traits using selection indices in commercial livestock breeding populations causes changes in allele frequency over time, termed selection signatures, at causal loci and other surrounding genomic regions.  Researchers and managers of pig breeding programs are motivated to understand the genetic basis of phenotypic diversity across genetic lines, breeds, and populations using selection signature analyses.  Here, we applied Generation Proxy Selection Mapping (GPSM), a genome-wide association analysis of SNP genotype (38,294 to 46,458 SNPs) on birth date, in four pig populations (15,457, 15,772, 16,595 and 8,447 pigs per population) to identify loci responding to artificial selection over a…

April 26, 2022

Comprehensive Exam: Using subgroup discovery techniques to identify a high-risk group of suicide attempts among people with diabetes

In 2019, 37.3 million Americans had diabetes mellitus, and 1.2 million Americans aged 18 and older had attempted suicide in the past year. According to previous studies, people with type 1 diabetes were three to four times more likely to attempt suicide, and newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes were two times more likely to attempt suicide when compared with the general population. However, understanding the relationship between suicide attempts and other risk factors for people with diabetes is still lacking. In medical research, the data mining technique has become a promising way to effectively analyze high-dimensional data by extracting…