Seminar Series

Picture of Timothy Haithcoat

Sep. 21, 2020

Implementing GeoARK: The Geospatial Analytical Research Knowledgebase

This research focuses on the development and implementation of an interface to the Geospatial Analytical Research Knowledgebase (GeoARK), a spatially enabled big data informatics approach assembled around applications in health research and analytics. Example applications in telehealth reach, COVID-19 risk in rural situations, pathways for zoonotic disease spread, and contextual leukemia research will be provided. The creation and design of GeoARK occurred within the University of Missouri’s Institute for Data Science and Informatics. Being spatially engendered, its core is data that is pre-processed, cleaned, integrated and represented in its spatial context as millions of point locations. To this core, additional…

Feb. 18, 2020

Neural information extraction in biomedical domain: issues and challenges

Much medical data today remain inaccessible thus limiting their impact on patient care. Images and illustrations, scientific articles, and free-text reports do not allow for easy extraction and re-use of the knowledge they contain. They lack the structure and metadata necessary for automated processing and annotation. The resources required to collect and annotate manually are not sufficient to produce enough comprehensive benchmark datasets to bootstrap specialty research. We discuss neural network-based approaches to the problem of extraction of medical information from clinical images and unstructured text sources.

Feb. 12, 2020

Applied AI in CDSS in Medicine: A Systematic Review

Objective: Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are continuously developing to solve medical problems and try to improve healthcare management, which has shown a significant result in reducing medical errors and improving multiple healthcare processes. These days, artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more influential in healthcare supporting physicians to make a clinical decision.  Materials and Methods: A systematic review was conducted to identify articles related to CDSS using AI algorithms. The original research was published between 2009 and 2019 in the English language. In a total of 3,687 identified articles, 1,112 articles were analyzed, and 199 articles are represented within this review.

Feb. 12, 2020

Contrast Data Mining and Pattern Discovery for Glaucoma Risk Assessments

Glaucoma is the second leading cause of irreversible blindness across the world, about 70 million people have glaucoma, and 4.4 million people are blind due to undiagnosed glaucoma by optic nerve damage worldwide. Studies show that early prediction is the best way to prevent irreversible blindness. To address this problem, we applied a subgroup contrast set mining for glaucoma risk assessment. Contrast mining has been successfully applied in health care data analytics and demonstrated in recent work from our lab using a large volume of EHR (Electronic health records) data analysis. The main goal of this method is to identify…

Dec. 4, 2019

Evaluation of chronic disease education & health information quality using online social networks & communities

Chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and mental illness are the leading causes of morbidity and disability. The total cost in the United States was $327 billion for diagnosed diabetes, 80.2 billion for cancer and $193.2 billion for serious mental illness. Chronic diseases rely a great deal on patient education and self-management and social media is an important tool for information dissemination in that regard.  Diabetes, cancer and mental illness are among the top 10 searched diseases on social media, which is among the newly emerging Consumer to Consumer (C2C) tools. For instance, Twitter is increasingly becoming a space for…

Oct. 23, 2019

Evaluation of Provider Documentation Patterns as a Tool to Deliver Ongoing Patient-Centered Diabetes Education and Support

Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world. As a disease with long term complications requiring changes in management, it requires ongoing diabetes self-management education and support (DSME/S). In the United States, however, only a small proportion of people with diabetes receive DSME/S. The diabetes education that providers deliver during follow up visits may be an important source for DSME/S. We collected 200 clinic notes for 100 adults with diabetes and studied the History of Present Illness (HPI) and Impression and Plan (I&P) sections. Using a codebook based on the seven principles of American Association of…

Oct. 23, 2019

Drug Repositioning for Subgroup discovery and Precision Medicine Implementation

Drug discovery is a high-cost, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process. With the declined approval rate for new drugs by the FDA, developing drug repositioning frameworks becomes crucial for improving patient care. Drug repositioning, known as old drugs for new uses, is an effective strategy to find new indications for existing drugs and is highly efficient, low-cost, and less risk. The proposed work is a network-based computational approach for subgroup cohort drug repositioning. Precision medicine is getting more attention to be applied in today’s healthcare system toward a more patient-centered system rather than a disease-based one. The phenotypic and genotypic variation among…

Oct. 16, 2019

Hierarchical agglomerative clustering of eusocial bee proteins

The assembly and annotation of the European Honey bee (Apis mellifera) genome has predicted more than 15,000 protein-coding genes and became the foundation for studies of nature and evolution of eusociality. Since then, other eusocial bee genomes have been sequenced, providing an excellent opportunity to seek additional insight into unique traits of eusocial bees at the genomic and proteomic level. We wish to build a non-redundant organization of protein sequences by applying an unsupervised hierarchical protein-clustering method to the protein sequences of 4 advanced eusocial honey bees and 2 primitively eusocial bumblebees. The clustering method will group proteins into clusters…

Oct. 8, 2019

Mutational Forks: Inferring Pathway Deregulation Based on Patient-Specific Genomics Profiles

The precise mechanism behind treatment resistance in cancer is still not fully understood. Despite advances in precision oncology, there is a lack of the tools that help to understand a mechanistic picture of treatment resistance in cancer patients. Existing enrichment methods heavily rely on quantitative data and limited to analysis of differentially expressed genes, ignoring crucial players that might be involved in this process. In order to tackle treatment resistance, the identification of deregulated flow of signal transduction is critical. Here, we introduce a bioinformatics framework that is capable of inferring deregulated flow of signal transduction given evidence-based knowledge about…