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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences

Innate Immunity, The Hepatic Extracellular Matrix, And Liver Injury: Mathematical Modeling Of Metastatic Potential And Tumor Development In Alcoholic Liver Disease., Shanice V. Hudson Dec 2018

Innate Immunity, The Hepatic Extracellular Matrix, And Liver Injury: Mathematical Modeling Of Metastatic Potential And Tumor Development In Alcoholic Liver Disease., Shanice V. Hudson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overarching goals of the current work are to fill key gaps in the current understanding of alcohol consumption and the risk of metastasis to the liver. Considering the evidence this research group has compiled confirming that the hepatic matrisome responds dynamically to injury, an altered extracellular matrix (ECM) profile appears to be a key feature of pre-fibrotic inflammatory injury in the liver. This group has demonstrated that the hepatic ECM responds dynamically to alcohol exposure, in particular, sensitizing the liver to LPS-induced inflammatory damage. Although the study of alcohol in its role as a contributing factor to oncogenesis and …


Bayesian Analytical Approaches For Metabolomics : A Novel Method For Molecular Structure-Informed Metabolite Interaction Modeling, A Novel Diagnostic Model For Differentiating Myocardial Infarction Type, And Approaches For Compound Identification Given Mass Spectrometry Data., Patrick J. Trainor Aug 2018

Bayesian Analytical Approaches For Metabolomics : A Novel Method For Molecular Structure-Informed Metabolite Interaction Modeling, A Novel Diagnostic Model For Differentiating Myocardial Infarction Type, And Approaches For Compound Identification Given Mass Spectrometry Data., Patrick J. Trainor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Metabolomics, the study of small molecules in biological systems, has enjoyed great success in enabling researchers to examine disease-associated metabolic dysregulation and has been utilized for the discovery biomarkers of disease and phenotypic states. In spite of recent technological advances in the analytical platforms utilized in metabolomics and the proliferation of tools for the analysis of metabolomics data, significant challenges in metabolomics data analyses remain. In this dissertation, we present three of these challenges and Bayesian methodological solutions for each. In the first part we develop a new methodology to serve a basis for making higher order inferences in metabolomics, …


Evaluation Of Drug-Loaded Gold Nanoparticle Cytotoxicity As A Function Of Tumor Tissue Heterogeneity., Hunter Allan Miller Aug 2018

Evaluation Of Drug-Loaded Gold Nanoparticle Cytotoxicity As A Function Of Tumor Tissue Heterogeneity., Hunter Allan Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inherent heterogeneity of tumor tissue presents a major challenge to nanoparticle-medicated drug delivery. This heterogeneity spans from the molecular to the cellular (cell types) and to the tissue (vasculature, extra-cellular matrix) scales. Here we employ computational modeling to evaluate therapeutic response as a function of vascular-induced tumor tissue heterogeneity. Using data with three-layered gold nanoparticles loaded with cisplatin, nanotherapy is simulated with different levels of tissue heterogeneity, and the treatment response is measured in terms of tumor regression. The results show that tumor vascular density non-trivially influences the nanoparticle uptake and washout, and the associated tissue response. The drug …


Generalized Spatiotemporal Modeling And Causal Inference For Assessing Treatment Effects For Multiple Groups For Ordinal Outcome., Soutik Ghosal Aug 2018

Generalized Spatiotemporal Modeling And Causal Inference For Assessing Treatment Effects For Multiple Groups For Ordinal Outcome., Soutik Ghosal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three projects and can be categorized in two broad research areas: generalized spatiotemporal modeling and causal inference based on observational data. In the first project, I introduce a Bayesian hierarchical mixed effect hurdle model with a nested random effect structure to model the count for primary care providers and understand their spatial and temporal variation. This study further enables us to identify the health professional shortage areas and the possible impacting factors. In the second project, I have unified popular parametric and nonparametric propensity score-based methods to assess the treatment effect of multiple groups for ordinal …


Designing Interactive Virtual Environments With Feedback In Health Applications., Yi Li May 2018

Designing Interactive Virtual Environments With Feedback In Health Applications., Yi Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the most important factors to influence user experience in human-computer interaction is the user emotional reaction. Interactive environments including serious games that are responsive to user emotions improve their effectiveness and user satisfactions. Testing and training for user emotional competence is meaningful in healthcare field, which has motivated us to analyze immersive affective games using emotional feedbacks. In this dissertation, a systematic model of designing interactive environment is presented, which consists of three essential modules: affect modeling, affect recognition, and affect control. In order to collect data for analysis and construct these modules, a series of experiments were …