Sep. 10, 2018
eCaregiving 2.0: Feasibility, Data Quality and Cost of Collecting Continuous Self-reported and Passive Data Using a Personal Health Management System
This project aims to demonstrate if self-reported and passive data can be continuously collected from a cohort of 55 study participants using Personal Health Management Information System (PHMS). We estimated measures of data quality, feasibility and cost of data collection after asking participants to wear Fitbit and download the app to manage data transmission from passive (daily) and active data collection through a monthly survey. In this six-month cohort study, we expected to capture 100% of survey-based self-reported data and 100% of passive data parameters totaling 9,848 days of measurement. With minimal instruction to participants, we captured 66% number of days of…
Sep. 6, 2018
Immunogenomic Pathway and Survival Analysis in Colorectal Cancer Patients Based on Tumor Location and Microsatellite Status
Despite the advancement of available therapies (surgery, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, etc.), colorectal cancer (CRC) as the third most common cancer still remains the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Typically, CRC patients could be categorized into microsatellite stable (MSS, approximately80-85% in CRC) or microsatellite instability (MSI, approximately 10-15% in CRC) type. An extensive literature has shown that CRC patients with MSI status have more T cells in the primary tumor than those with MSS status. This is believed to contribute to the 78% of the MSI patients who had cancer progression-free survival after receiving immunotherapy (Pembrolizumab, an anti-PD-1 immunotherapy)…
Sep. 6, 2018
Income Inequality and Health: Expanding our Understanding of State Level Effects by using a Geospatial Big Data Approach
The income inequality hypothesis proposes that ecological income inequality is harmful for population health but findings from extant work are inconsistent across health outcomes and levels of geography. We contribute to this debate by applying a big data geospatial approach to create three innovative measures of uniformity in income inequality across space within US states. Controlling for relevant individual and contextual characteristics, we evaluate multilevel models of individuals within states using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and American Community Survey to examine the ways that income inequality, operationalized as the Gini coefficient, and the three uniformity measures…
April 24, 2018
Using Deep learning method (CNN) for prediction of ubiquitination protein
Ubiquitination, as a post-translational modification, is a crucial biological process presented in cell signaling, death and localization. Identification of ubiquitination protein is of fundamental importance for understanding molecular mechanisms in biological systems and diseases. Although high-throughput experimental studies using mass spectrometry have identified many ubiquitination proteins and ubiquitination sites, the vast majority of ubiquitination proteins remain undiscovered, even in well studied model organisms. To reduce experimental costs, computational (in silico) methods have been introduced to predict ubiquitination sites. If we can predict whether a query protein can be ubiquitinated or not, it is meaningful by itself and helpful for predicting…
April 13, 2018
Automation of Volumetric Analysis of Adiposity in Canines
Roughly 30-40% of all dogs and cats that are seen by a veterinarian can be classified as obese. Despite this, veterinary practices still utilize a 5 point or 9 point subjective classification system when classifying patients as obese, which can provide difficult when providing accurate nutritional consults to veterinary clients aiming to decrease their pet’s weight. Further, the obesity itself can lead to worsening of comorbid conditions. Thus, an automation of the process of assessing adiposity through CT scan was attempted, looking specifically at the thoracic region of the animal. First, the issues with the current BCS system were highlighted…
March 28, 2018
Effects of Pain Management Clinical Decision Support in an Inpatient Setting for Patients Experiencing Abdominal Pain
Disorganization of pain-management-related information in an EMR may limit clinicians’ ability to consider clinical factors comprehensively. A clinical decision support (CDS) system for pain management was developed and deployed at University of Missouri Healthcare. CDS effects were examined for inpatients with diagnoses of diverticulitis, pancreatitis, and abdominal pain. Statistically significant differences were found in the average NRS-11 self-reported pain scores with a mean reduction of 0.7, and number of pain related medications prescribed, with a mean reduction of 1.2 pain medication orders per day. No statistical correlation was found between the use of the CDS and prescription of different classes of pain medications at discharge, nor…
March 8, 2018
Using Social Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Describe Communication Practices of Interdisciplinary Teams in Primary Care
The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) serves different purposes including documentation of care and billing. One part of the EMR at the University of Missouri Hospital and Clinics is the Message Center. Many people, including healthcare providers, nurses, social workers, therapists, office staff, and nurse care managers (known as the interdisciplinary team, or IDT) work together to deliver healthcare. This research examines how the Message Center is used in primary care by nurse care managers to document care coordination activities, including communication between patients, patient identified family or significant other, and the IDT. Care coordination activities, and the focus of those activities…
March 7, 2018
Seasonal Influenza Vaccine: Not easy shot to get
During the past nearly 50 years, antigenic variants of subtype H3N2 influenza A viruses have frequently emerged, causing significant public health challenges. The manner in which these variants emerge and their patterns of spread are not well understood. We identified 15 antigenic drift events with 16 antigenic variants during 1968–2016 by using a novel genomic sequence–based antigenicity inference method on ~40,000 H3N2 viruses. New antigenic variants were shown to emerge from certain locations in other continents rather than from Asia alone, and variants emerged year-round and took <2 months to spread across multiple continents. The uncertainty of the location of…
Feb. 23, 2018
REDESIGN: RDF-based Differential Signaling Framework for Precision Medicine Analytics
Pathway-based analysis holds promise to be instrumental in precision and personalized medicine analytics. However, the majority of pathway-based analysis methods utilize “fixed” or “rigid” data sets that limit their ability to account for complex biological inter-dependencies. Here, we present REDESIGN: RDF-based Differential Signaling Pathway informatics framework. The distinctive feature of the REDESIGN is that it is designed to run on “flexible” ontology-enabled data sets of curated signal transduction pathway maps to uncover high explanatory differential pathway mechanisms on gene-to-gene level. The experiments on two morphoproteomic cases demonstrated REDESIGN’s capability to generate actionable hypotheses in precision/personalized medicine analytics.