MUII Dissertation Defense-Lynsey Whitacre

Alternative Applications of Whole Genome De Novo Assembly in Animal Genomics   Improvements in whole genome sequencing technologies have allowed substantial increases in the amount of data that can be generated on a single individual. This has facilitated many de novo genome assembly projects in the animal sciences. The overarching goal of de novo assembly is to overlap sequencing reads to construct contiguous sequences, also known as contigs or scaffolds, representing the genome. Once a high quality de novo assembly is constructed, it is often used to determine variation in the genome or simply as a reference for future resequencing projects.

MUII Dissertation Defense- Rhonda Archie

Information Technology (IT) Interconnectivity in a Rural Health Setting: A Conceptual Model   Current and past developments in Health (HIT) systems in rural settings have focused on the use of electronic health records by health professionals. These systems were conducted in standalone mode, or coupled with the integration of HIT systems of two or more other HIT systems. In addition, this lack of interconnectivity involved diminished coordination in information sharing among the systems (Bahensky 2008; McCullough 2009). Grossman (2006) and Kevin (2008) investigated the state of HIT systems’ interconnectivity using networks in a rural health setting to promote sharing and…

MUII Defense Announcement – Andrew Hutson

Background: The percentage of patients with polypharmacy needs is increasing among a growing patient population. As a result, the amount of time health care professionals require to make clinical decisions based on current and past medications is increasing. Health care professionals need methods for increasing the speed of clinical decision making without sacrificing the quality of care.  The goal of this study is to demonstrate how modifying the data visualization for patient medication histories will change decision making speed or efficacy. Methods: We compared two groups across five randomized blocks. Group 1 responded to questions based on the control data…

MUII Defense Announcement – Ginger Han

Biomedical image data have been growing quickly in volume, speed, and complexity, and there is an increasing reliance on the analysis of these data. Biomedical scientists are in need of efficient and accurate analyses of large-scale imaging data, as well as innovative retrieval methods for visually similar imagery across a large-scale data collection to assist complex study in biological and medical applications. Moreover, biomedical images rely on increased resolution to capture subtle phenotypes of diseases, but this poses a challenge for clinicians to sift through haystacks of visual cues to make informative diagnoses.  To tackle these challenges, we developed computational…