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Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: October 2005, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2005

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Update from October 14 and 28, 2005.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Comparative Effectiveness Of Total Population Versus Disease-Specific Neural Network Models In Predicting Medical Costs, Albert G. Crawford, Joseph P. Fuhr Jr., Janice Clarke, Brandon Hubbs

College of Population Health Faculty Papers

The objective of this research was to compare the accuracy of two types of neural networks in identifying individuals at risk for high medical costs for three chronic conditions. Two neural network models—a population model and three disease-specific models—were compared regarding effectiveness predicting high costs. Subjects included 33,908 health plan members with diabetes, 19,264 with asthma, and 2,605 with cardiac conditions. For model development/testing, only members with 24 months of continuous enrollment were included. Models were developed to predict probability of high costs in 2000 (top 15% of distribution) based on 1999 claims factors. After validation, models were applied to …

Executive Order No. Kbb 2005-49 : Temporary Location Of Lsu School Of Medicine, Executive Department, State Of Louisiana

LSUHSC Hurricane Katrina Archive: Reports & Presentations

The State of Louisiana Executive Order No. KBB 2005-49 is a two page document created on September 23, 2005 by the Executive Department of the State of Louisiana to formally make lawful the relocation of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.

This executive order was necessary due to the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the physical inaccessibility of the New Orleans campuses.

Estimation Of Direct Causal Effects, Maya L. Petersen, Mark J. Van Der Laan

U.C. Berkeley Division of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Many common problems in epidemiologic and clinical research involve estimating the effect of an exposure on an outcome while blocking the exposure's effect on an intermediate variable. Effects of this kind are termed direct effects. Estimation of direct effects arises frequently in research aimed at understanding mechanistic pathways by which an exposure acts to cause or prevent disease, as well as in many other settings. Although multivariable regression is commonly used to estimate direct effects, this approach requires assumptions beyond those required for the estimation of total causal effects. In addition, multivariable regression estimates a particular type of direct effect, …

The 8th Annual Summer Seminar: Gina Kolata Science Writer, The New York Times, Jamie Howell, Mirko Sikirica

Population Health Matters (Formerly Health Policy Newsletter)

No abstract available.

A Nonstationary Negative Binomial Time Series With Time-Dependent Covariates: Enterococcus Counts In Boston Harbor, E. Andres Houseman, Brent Coull, James P. Shine

Harvard University Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Boston Harbor has had a history of poor water quality, including contamination by enteric pathogens. We conduct a statistical analysis of data collected by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) between 1996 and 2002 to evaluate the effects of court-mandated improvements in sewage treatment. Motivated by the ineffectiveness of standard Poisson mixture models and their zero-inflated counterparts, we propose a new negative binomial model for time series of Enterococcus counts in Boston Harbor, where nonstationarity and autocorrelation are modeled using a nonparametric smooth function of time in the predictor. Without further restrictions, this function is not identifiable in the presence …

Dentalgram - Vol. 19, No. 09, Loma Linda University School Of Dentistry

Dentalgram

In this issue:

• Group practice system enters fifth year
• Community-Based Dental Partnership program grant renewed
• Advanced education program in prosthodontics welcomes residents
• Faculty and alumni help tsunami victims
• Department news

The Relation Between Inhibitory Control And Children’S Eyewitness Memory, Kim P. Roberts, Martine B. Powell

Psychology Faculty Publications

The hypothesis that inhibitory control – an aspect of executive functioning – is related to children’s suggestibility was tested. Five- to 7-year-olds (N = 125) participated in a staged event, were suggestively interviewed, and were later given a recognition test. Conflict and interference measures of inhibitory control were taken and compared to children’s ability to identify details from the target event and reject details from non-target sources (i.e., false suggestions, details from prior events). Children with higher than average verbal retroactive inhibition skills were more resistant to suggestions than children with poor inhibitory control. Collectively, age and retroactive inhibition …

Measuring Nurse Workload In Ambulatory Care, Beth Ann Swan Phd, Crnp, Karen F. Griffin Msn, Rn, Cnaa

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Nurses and adequate nurse staffing are critical to the delivery of safe, cost-effective, and quality patient care in every health care setting.

This has been proven time and again through various research studies and recognized by various accrediting bodies such as JCAHO.

However, the information available on required or optimal ambulatory care nurse staffing is limited and varies across ambulatory care settings.

An overview of instruments for measuring nursing workload in ambulatory care, a critical prerequisite when identifying best nurse staffing models for diverse ambulatory care settings, is provided.

The Outcome Of Mta As A Root End Filling Material: A Long Term Evaluation, Christopher M. Sechrist

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Periradicular surgery is a viable option to save natural teeth when non-surgical treatment fails or when endodontic retreatment is not feasible or contraindicated. Laboratory and animal studies have demonstrated that MTA is biocompatible, provides an excellent seal against penetrating bacteria, and promotes hard tissue healing. The purpose of this study was to provide long term (>3 years) clinical evidence for its use as a root-end filling material in endodontics. The clinical records of 294 patients who had MTA used during endodontic treatment from 1996 to 2001 were reviewed. From these, 75 patients whose root end cavities had been filled …

A Tale Of Two Methods—Agent-Based Simulation And System Dynamics— Applied In A Biomedical Context: Acute Inflammatory Response, Wayne W. Wakeland, Joe Fusion, Brahm Goldstein

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Three specific models of the acute inflammatory response were contrasted. The first model was a recently published and rather complex agent-based model used to simulate clinical trials in silico. The second model was a highly simplified system dynamics model developed during the present research. The third model was also recently published, with similar objectives to the first model, but utilized a complex set of 18 differential equations. The study found that the complexity of the first and third models is likely to adversely impact their usefulness, at least for other researchers. The second model, which is too simple to …

Laser And Led Effects On The Proliferation Rate Of Periodontal Ligament Fibroblasts, Allen J. Job

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

PURPOSE: To compare the effectiveness of a Gallium Aluminum Arsenide (GaAlAs) diode laser and a light emitting diode (LED) on periodontal ligament fibroblast cell proliferative rates.

METHODS and MATERIALS: PDLF obtained from freshly extracted permanent teeth were cultured under standard conditions until a subconfluent monolayer was present. The next section took 5 days to complete. On day 1, the initial cell concentration of 700 uL/cm² was plated on 96-well assay plates and placed in a CO₂ incubator at 37° C for 24 hours. On day 2, cell counts were first verified using hemocytometry then were irradiated using an …

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: September 2005, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2005

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Update from September 30, 2005.

This update describes damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Synthesis Of Lanthanum-Strontium Magnanites By A Hydroxide-Precursor Co-Precipitation Method In Solution And In Reverse Micellar Microemulsion, Vuk Uskoković, Darko Makovec, Miha Drofenik

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Nanostructured lanthanum-strontium manganites have been synthesized using two different co-precipitation approaches, one in bulk solution, and the other in reverse micelles of CTAB/1-hexanol/1-butanol/water microemulsion. In both cases, precursor cations were precipitated by alkali precipitating agents. The properties of the material synthesized by using these two methods were compared in order to reveal potential advantages of microemulsion-assisted approach. The influence of the annealing conditions on the properties of synthesized manganites was investigated by using X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, differential thermal analysis, thermogravimetric analysis and magnetic measurements.

Towards Knowledge Morphing: A Triangulation Approach To Link Tacit And Explicit Knowledge, Fehmida Hussain, Syed Sibte Raza Abidi, Syed Ali Raza

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Current knowledge management systems are largely designed to deal with a single knowledge modality. Given the diversity of knowledge modalities that encompass any given topic/problem it is reasonable to demand access and use of all available knowledge, irrespective of their representation modality, to derive a knowledge-mediated solution. This calls for selecting all knowledge elements (represented in different modalities) that are relevant to the solution of the problem at hand. Thus here we pursue the specification and implementation of such a knowledge-mediated solution using a triangulation approach leading to Knowledge Morphing. In this paper we present a tacit-explicit knowledge morphing (TEKM) …

Direct Effect Models, Mark J. Van Der Laan, Maya L. Petersen

U.C. Berkeley Division of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

The causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is generally mediated by several intermediate variables. Estimation of the component of the causal effect of a treatment that is mediated by a given intermediate variable (the indirect effect of the treatment), and the component that is not mediated by that intermediate variable (the direct effect of the treatment) is often relevant to mechanistic understanding and to the design of clinical and public health interventions. Under the assumption of no-unmeasured confounders for treatment and the intermediate variable, Robins & Greenland (1992) define an individual direct effect as the counterfactual effect of …

Dynamic Effects Of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement On The Fitness Of Viruses, Derek Cummings, Ira Schwartz, Lora Billings, Leah Shaw, Donald Burke

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a phenomenon in which viral replication is increased rather than decreased by immune sera, has been observed in vitro for a large number of viruses of public health importance, including flaviviruses, coronaviruses, and retroviruses. The most striking in vivo example of ADE in humans is dengue hemorrhagic fever, a disease in which ADE is thought to increase the severity of clinical manifestations of dengue virus infection by increasing virus replication. We examine the epidemiological impact of ADE on the prevalence and persistence of viral serotypes. Using a dynamical system model of n cocirculating dengue serotypes, we find …

Applying Cognitive Psychology To Education, Training And Testing: Review Of Experimental Cognitive Psychology And Its Applications, A. F. Healy (Ed.)., Brian H. Bornstein

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This book, which is part of the American Psychological Association’s Decade of Behavior series, is both less and more than it seems. Its title sounds like it would be suitable for a cognitive psychology laboratory course, but its scope is too narrow for that. It focuses largely on a relatively small subset of applied cognitive psychological topics—education, training, and testing—and the research traditions of three (albeit three distinguished and influential) researchers: Lyle Bourne, Walter Kintsch, and Thomas Landauer. In that sense, then, the book is less than it seems. In another sense, though, it is more than it seems. In …

Exploration Of Lip Shape Measures And Their Association With Tongue Contact Patterns, Jessica Lynn Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

A variety of tools and techniques have been developed to measure the movements of the vocal tract, specifically of the tongue and lips. In recent years, computer technology has allowed for extensive exploration of these precise movements and for the development of speech recognition systems. However, there has been relatively little work on the combination of visible facial movements and internal articulatory activity. In this study, two different technologies were used to explore the internal and external movements of speech production in eight speakers: palatometry quantified tongue contact patterns and computerized video image analysis was used to derive lip shape …

Effects Of Information And Machine Learning Algorithms On Word Sense Disambiguation With Small Datasets, Gondy Leroy, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Current approaches to word sense disambiguation use (and often combine) various machine learning techniques. Most refer to characteristics of the ambiguity and its surrounding words and are based on thousands of examples. Unfortunately, developing large training sets is burdensome, and in response to this challenge, we investigate the use of symbolic knowledge for small datasets. A naïve Bayes classifier was trained for 15 words with 100 examples for each. Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types assigned to concepts found in the sentence and relationships between these semantic types form the knowledge base. The most frequent sense of a word …

Factors Affecting Distribution And Abundance Of Aquatic Macroinvertebrates In Autumnal Wetlands In Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, Usa, Jered Studinski

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Despite a recent surge of interest in temporary lentic systems, a strong theory linking the biota to its environment has not emerged. Data were collected from ten autumnal wetlands at Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, U.S.A., in an effort to elucidate the environmental variables (EV's) that affected both between- and within-pond macroinvertebrate distribution and abundance. Canonical correspondence analyses performed with between-pond data failed to find strong relationships between the macroinvertebrates and EV's. Additionally, the theory that hydroperiod would effect richness did not apply to these ponds. Within-pond canonical correspondence analyses, however, yielded strong relationships. Further testing using regression analysis and …

Development And Validation Of An Anthropometrically Based Prediction Equation For Estimating The Percent Body Fat Of Post-Menopausal Black Females, Leanne Petry, Lloyd L. Laubach, Peter W. Hovey, Nikki Lynn Rogers, Bradford Towne, William Cameron Chumlea

Population and Public Health Sciences Faculty Publications

Anthropometric equations developed specifically for the estimation of body composition parameters in Black females are limited. Data from the Lifespan Health Research Center were used to develop a new, easy to use equation to estimate the percent body fat of post-menopausal Black females using simple and easy to collect anthropometrics. The body composition of 72 post-menopausal Black females was measured by Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA). Validation (N=55) and cross-validation groups (N=17) were randomly assigned. Prediction models were developed using stepwise multiple regression analyses with percent body fat as the dependent variable and various anthropometrics as the independent variables. The …

Implications Of Spatial Autocorrelation And Dispersal For The Modeling Of Species Distributions, Volker Bahn

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Modeling the geographical distributions of wildlife species is important for ecology and conservation biology. Spatial autocorrelation in species distributions poses a problem for distribution modeling because it invalidates the assumption of independence among sample locations. I explored the prevalence and causes of spatial autocorrelation in data from the Breeding Bird Survey, covering the conterminous United States, using Regression Trees, Conditional Autoregressive Regressions (CAR), and the partitioning of variance. I also constructed a simulation model to investigate dispersal as a process contributing to spatial autocorrelation, and attempted to verify the connection between dispersal and spatial autocorrelation in species’ distributions in empirical …

Com Outlook Summer 2005, College Of Osteopathic Medicine

COM Outlook

No abstract provided.

Animal Models Of Head Trauma, Ibolja Cernak

Biomedicine and Animal Models in Research Collection

Animal models of traumatic brain injury (TBI) are used to elucidate primary and secondary sequelae underlying human head injury in an effort to identify potential neuroprotective therapies for developing and adult brains. The choice of experimental model depends upon both the research goal and underlying objectives. The intrinsic ability to study injuryinduced changes in behavior, physiology, metabolism, the blood/tissue interface, the blood brain barrier, and/or inflammatory- and immune-mediated responses, makes in vivo TBI models essential for neurotrauma research. Whereas human TBI is a highly complex multifactorial disorder, animal trauma models tend to replicate only single factors involved in the pathobiology …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 47 Number 1, Summer 2005, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

9 - A MOGUL IN THE MAKING By Larry Sokoloff J.D. '92 While working toward his business degree, SCU sophomore Tyler Dickman runs a multimillion-dollar business based in Florida.

10 - TOP OF THE CLASS: FOUNDATION HONORS INNOVATIVE SCU PROFESSORS By Kim Kooyers. This year's winners of the Louis and Dorina Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence and the Brutocao Family Foundation Award for Curriculum Innovation are examples of the SCU's outstanding teaching scholars.

14 - A GLOBAL ETHIC: A CONVERSATION WITH HANS KUNG By Rita Beamish '74 Hans Kung, scholar, Roman Catholic priest, and author of some 50 books on …

Prevention Of Periodontal Diseases, Andrew R. Dentino, Moawia M. Kassab, Erica J. Renner

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Development Of Dose Conversion Coefficients For Radionuclides Produced In Spallation Neutron Sources Quarterly Progress Report 4/01/05 – 6/30/05, Phillip W. Patton, Mark Rudin

Transmutation Sciences Physics (TRP)

The research consortium comprised of representatives from several universities and national laboratories has successfully generated internal and external dose conversion coefficients for twenty radionuclides produced in spallation neutron sources. These dose coefficients fill data gaps exist in Federal Guide Report No. 11 and in Publications 68 and 72 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and two articles containing the data have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Health Physics. Currently, more nuclear data is needed for the rare radionuclides produced from a mercury target. While attempting to develop a workable plan to acquire this missing data, …

Ada News - 06/20/2005, American Dental Association, Publishing Division

ADA News

Established in 1970 as the official newspaper of the American Dental Association, the ADA News serves practicing dentists and others allied to the dental profession in the U.S. and internationally. It is the No. 1 source of news and information about the many benefits and services the ADA delivers to members daily as well as timely information on scientific, social, political and economic developments affecting dentistry and health care.

The Effects Of Brain Gym® Activities On Second-Grade Students' Academic Performance And Handwriting Skills, Kristen Keinath

Masters Theses

Objective: The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the effects of Brain Gym® activities on second-grand students' academic performance and handwriting skills.

Method: Results were obtained by administering the Test of Handwriting Skills (THS) to two classrooms in a Northern Michigan Elementary School and having both teachers complete a self-developed Academic Performance Form on each student participating in the study. The data from was analyzed using a t-test for the THS and mean scores for the self-developed Academic Performance Form.

Results: Findings suggest a significant difference (p < .05) in the number of letters produced in 20 seconds and spacing of letters. Non-standardized testing showed a decrease in attention to task scores between pre- and post-testing.

Conclusion: Brain Gym® activities were shown to positively effect handwriting …