Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Reduced-Scale Experiments And Numerical Simulations Of Informal Settlement Dwelling Fires, Vigneshwaran Narayanan, Antonio Cicicone, Ayden D. Botha, Richard Shaun Walls

Progress in Scale Modeling, an International Journal

Informal settlement dwellings (ISDs) house approximately one billion people in the developing world and this number is expected to double by the year 2030. Contemporary research on ISD fires has focused on understanding the fire dynamics within individual dwellings (micro-scale) and fire spread in settlements consisting of multiple dwellings (macro-scale). This paper aims to do two primary things: investigate if scaling methods that were derived for compartments with thermally thick boundaries can be applied to ISDs (compartments with thermally thin boundaries), and if they can adequately represent the most important phenomena associated with full-scale ISD fires; and demonstrate Fire Dynamics …

Genomic Tools Reveal Complex Social Organization Of An Invasive Large Mammal (Sus Scrofa), Chelsea L. Titus, Courtney F. Bowden, Timothy J. Smyser, Stephen L. Webb, James C. Beasley

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

A comprehensive understanding of sociality in wildlife is vital to optimizing conservation and management efforts. However, sociality is complicated, especially for widely distributed species that exhibit substantive behavioral plasticity. Invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa), often representing hybrids of European wild boar and domestic pigs, are among the most adaptable and widely distributed large mammals. The social structure of wild pigs is believed to be similar to European wild boar, consisting of matriarchal groups (sounders) and solitary males. However, wild pig social structure is understudied and largely limited to visual observations. Using a hierarchical approach, we incorporated genomic tools …

Mobile Health Applications For Postpartum Depression Management: A Theory-Informed Analysis Of Change-Use-Engagement (Cue) Criteria In The Digital Environment, Alexandra Zingg, Laura Carter, Deevakar Rogith, Sudhakar Selvaraj, Amy Franklin, Sahiti Myneni

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Postpartum Depression (PPD) is the most common childbirth complication, with approximately 15% of postpartum women experiencing depression symptoms. Mobile applications have potential to expand delivery of mental health interventions. However, our understanding of how these tools engage women with PPD and facilitate positive behavioral changes is limited. In our paper, we analyze 15 commercial PPD applications to understand their role as facilitators of change, engagement, and sustained use. Applications reviewed contained an average of four theory-based behavioral change techniques, and highest patient engagement level reached was to empower patients through patient-generated data. Heuristic violations were identified in areas including user …

A Preliminary Study Of Proinflammatory Cytokines And Depression Following West Nile Virus Infection, Allison Lino, Timothy A. Erickson, Melissa Nolan Ph.D., Mph, Kristy O. Murray, Shannon E. Ronca

Faculty Publications

West Nile virus (WNV) is a neurotropic flavivirus that can cause acute febrile illness leading to neuroinvasive disease. Depression is a well-described outcome following infection, but the underlying pathogenic mechanisms are unknown. Proinflammatory cytokines play important roles in WNV infection, but their role in depression post-WNV remains unstudied. This research aimed to retrospectively evaluate associations between proinflammatory cytokines and new onset depression in a WNV cohort. Participants with asymptomatic WNV infection were significantly less likely to report new onset depression when compared to those with symptomatic disease. Participants with encephalitis and obesity were significantly more likely to report new onset …

Investigation Of The Association Of Exposures To Fire-Related Hazards With Pulmonary Function Of Firefighters, David G. Goldfarb

Dissertations and Theses

Background. Firefighters are habitually exposed to hazardous toxicants which place them at an elevated risk for numerous adverse health outcomes. An example of this is the associations observed in other works between inhalation of combustion byproducts from urban structural fires and both acute and chronic pulmonary dysfunction. To-date, the characterization of firefighters’ exposures to dangerous chemicals in smoke from non-wildfire incidents, both directly through personal monitoring and indirectly from work-related records is scarce. Prior works investigating the association between routine firefighting and pulmonary function have relied on crude metrics such as years of service and numbers of responses to …

Weakly-Supervised Tumor Purity Prediction From Frozen H&E Stained Slides, Matthew Brendel, Vanesa Getseva, Majd Al Assaad, Michael Sigouros, Alexandros Sigaras, Troy Kane, Pegah Khosravi, Juan Miguel Mosquera, Olivier Elemento, Iman Hajirasouliha

Publications and Research

Background

Estimating tumor purity is especially important in the age of precision medicine. Purity estimates have been shown to be critical for correction of tumor sequencing results, and higher purity samples allow for more accurate interpretations from next-generation sequencing results. Molecular-based purity estimates using computational approaches require sequencing of tumors, which is both time-consuming and expensive.

Methods

Here we propose an approach, weakly-supervised purity (wsPurity), which can accurately quantify tumor purity within a digitally captured hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological slide, using several types of cancer from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) as a proof-of-concept.

Findings

Our model predicts …

Development Of Optical Nanomaterial For Enhanced Cerenkov Imaging, Qize Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cancer is a significant public health problem worldwide and is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Imaging has increasingly been used over the last two decades to improve the diagnosis and guidance of tumor tissue removal surgery. Among the most widely used techniques for in vivo imaging are planar and tomographic fluorescence imaging and bioluminescence imaging. Despite their utility, these techniques are primarily restricted to preclinical use. Factors that have prevented translation from the bench to the bedside include depth-penetration considerations, regulatory issues, and toxicity. A recent development in nuclear imaging has been the ability to …

Data-Driven Analysis Of Drug And Substance Abuse Rates Across The Varying Regions In The United States Of America, Reem Saleh

University Honors Theses

Drugs and substance abuse is one of the leading causes of death for adolescents in the United States. The consequences of using these drugs are profound and can cause both damage to one's physical and psychological health. The rates of drug abuse in the United States continue to increase over the years. This paper analyzes the trends in rates of drug abuse in the four regions in the United States. It looks at the rates in cocaine, cigarettes, marijuana, and tobacco. A preliminary analysis was done to look at the trend in rates followed by an ARIMA time series model …

Air Pollutant Levels And Asthma Emergency Room Visits In A Highly Populous Us Urban County During 2018-19, Osaremhen Ikhile, Jingjing Yin, Atin Adhikari

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Objective: Air pollutants are linked to asthma exacerbation. The study purpose was to demonstrate an association between air pollutants levels and asthma emergency room (ER) visit trends in a highly populated US urban county in Georgia during 2018-2019.

Methods: Time series analyses were conducted for the variations in daily numbers of children and adult asthma emergency room visits and changes in daily mean PM_2.5, daily mean PM₁₀ concentrations, daily max 1-hour SO₂ concentrations, daily max 1-hour NO₂ concentrations, daily max 8-hour ozone concentrations, and airborne pollen loads for 2018 to 2019 and potential trends were …

Biomimetic And Medical Applications Of Hollow Nanoscale Structures, Justin Fang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Materials whose structure incorporates nanoscale void spaces have multiple possible uses, whether in a bulk form or as individual particles, due to the combination of high surface area ratios and nanoscale material properties. This thesis will explore a few of these possibilities, concentrating on potential biomimetic and biomedical applications, for two materials: metal- organic frameworks and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanocages.

Metal-organic frameworks consist of metal ions such as Cu2+ which have highly porous lattice structures allowing them to absorb and release guest molecules such as peptides like diphenylalanine; this stored chemical energy can be turned into kinetic energy and used …

Leveraging Context Patterns For Medical Entity Classification, Garrett Johnston

Computer Science Senior Theses

The ability of patients to understand health-related text is important for optimal health outcomes. A system that can automatically annotate medical entities could help patients better understand health-related text. Such a system would also accelerate manual data annotation for this low-resource domain as well as assist in down- stream medical NLP tasks such as finding textual similarity, identifying conflicting medical advice, and aspect-based sentiment analysis. In this work, we investigate a state-of-the-art entity set expansion model, BootstrapNet, for the task of medical entity classification on a new dataset of medical advice text. We also propose EP SBERT, a simple model …

External Validation Of A Laboratory Prediction Algorithm For The Reduction Of Unnecessary Labs In The Critical Care Setting, Linda T Li, Tongtong Huang, Elmer V Bernstam, Xiaoqian Jiang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Unnecessary laboratory tests contribute to iatrogenic harm and are a major source of waste in the health care system. We previously developed a machine learning algorithm to help clinicians identify unnecessary laboratory tests, but it has not been externally validated. In this study, we externally validate our machine learning algorithm.

METHODS: To externally validate the machine learning algorithm that was originally trained on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) III database, we tested the algorithm in a separate institution. We identified and abstracted data for all patients older than 18 years admitted to the intensive care unit …

A Multi-Task Gaussian Process Self-Attention Neural Network For Real-Time Prediction Of The Need For Mechanical Ventilators In Covid-19 Patients, Kai Zhang, Siddharth Karanth, Bela Patel, Robert Murphy, Xiaoqian Jiang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has overwhelmed the capacity of healthcare resources and posed a challenge for worldwide hospitals. The ability to distinguish potentially deteriorating patients from the rest helps facilitate reasonable allocation of medical resources, such as ventilators, hospital beds, and human resources. The real-time accurate prediction of a patient's risk scores could also help physicians to provide earlier respiratory support for the patient and reduce the risk of mortality.

METHODS: We propose a robust real-time prediction model for the in-hospital COVID-19 patients' probability of requiring mechanical ventilation (MV). The end-to-end neural network model incorporates the Multi-task …

Are Pregnant Women With Disability Prescribed Opioids More And At Higher Dosages Than Those Without Disability?: A Retrospective Cohort Study Of South Carolina Medicaid Beneficiaries, Chelsea L. Richard Phd, Msph, Bryan L. Love Pharm.D., Nansi Boghossian, James Hardin Ph.D., Suzanne Mcdermott

Faculty Publications

Background: Nationally, individuals with disability have higher rates of opioid use and misuse and are prescribed higher doses than those without disability. Opioid prescriptions during pregnancy are associated with adverse birth outcomes. Objective: To understand the difference in opioid prescribing during pregnancy over time by disability status among Medicaid beneficiaries who gave birth from 2008 to 2017 in South Carolina. Methods: Data from hospital discharges, vital records, and pharmacy were linked to determine the mother's disability status, opioid prescriptions filled during pregnancy, and other maternal characteristics. Disability status was characterized into physical disability, inflammatory conditions, intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), …

Codem: Conditional Domain Embeddings For Scalable Human Activity Recognition, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Avijoy Chakma, Zahid Hasan, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the effect of auxiliary labels in improving the classification accuracy of wearable sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) systems, which are primarily trained with the supervision of the activity labels (e.g. running, walking, jumping). Supplemental meta-data are often available during the data collection process such as body positions of the wearable sensors, subjects' demographic information (e.g. gender, age), and the type of wearable used (e.g. smartphone, smart-watch). This information, while not directly related to the activity classification task, can nonetheless provide auxiliary supervision and has the potential to significantly improve the HAR accuracy by providing extra guidance on how …

Rhythmedge: Enabling Contactless Heart Rate Estimation On The Edge, Zahid Hasan, Emon Dey, Sreenivasan Ramasamy Ramamurthy, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The primary contribution of this paper is designing and prototyping a real-time edge computing system, RhythmEdge, that is capable of detecting changes in blood volume from facial videos (Remote Photoplethysmography; rPPG), enabling cardio-vascular health assessment instantly. The benefits of RhythmEdge include non-invasive measurement of cardiovascular activity, real-time system operation, inexpensive sensing components, and computing. RhythmEdge captures a short video of the skin using a camera and extracts rPPG features to estimate the Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal using a multi-task learning framework while offloading the edge computation. In addition, we intelligently apply a transfer learning approach to the multi-task learning framework to …

Leveraging Single Cell Technologies For The Characterization And Treatment Of Refractory Pancreatic Cancer, Maria Monberg

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Heterogeneity is a hallmark of cancer, and the advent of multimodal single-cell technologies has helped uncover heterogeneity in a high-throughput manner in different cancers across varied contexts at an unprecedented resolution. In an effort to improve precision medicine approaches in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a highly lethal malignancy with a mere 11% 5-year survival rate, this dissertation focuses on first questioning the assumptions of the most basic models used to study PDAC via multimodal single-cell characterization methods at multiple levels of biological organization (scCNVseq and snATACseq for DNA assays, scRNAseq for transcriptomics, and paired protein assays such as multiplexed immunofluorescence …

Communicative Strategies For Building Public Confidence In Data Governance: Analyzing Singapore's Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Initiatives, Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments for the purposes of contact tracing and epidemiological investigation. However, concerns about surveillance and data privacy have stunted the adoption of such contact-tracing initiatives. This commentary analyzes Singapore's contact-tracing initiative to uncover the reasons for public resistance and efforts by the state to address them. The government's contact-tracing program …

Knowledge, Attitudes, And Covid-19 Prevention Practices Of Healthcare Workers In Indonesia: A Mobile-Based Cross-Sectional Survey, Besral Besral, Zulvi Wiyanti, Dion Zein Nurizin, Milla Herdayati, R Sutiawan, Martya Rahmaniati, Popy Yuniar

Kesmas

Knowledge of disease can affect attitudes and prevention practices, and wrong attitudes and practices can directly increase the risk of disease infection. This study aimed to describe the knowledge, attitudes, and COVID-19 prevention practice of healthcare workers in Indonesia and factors associated with prevention practices. A mobile-based cross-sectional survey was conducted in August 2020 with 254 healthcare workers in Indonesia. The self-administered questionnaire consisted of four parts: 1) sociodemographic information, 2) knowledge of COVID-19, 3) attitudes and anxiety toward COVID-19, and 4) COVID-19 prevention practices. The results indicated that healthcare workers in Indonesia had excellent knowledge and positive attitudes about …

Infarct Diameter For Predicting Cognitive Dysfunction In Ischemic Stroke Survivors In West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, Herpan Syafii Harahap, Setyawati Asih Putri, Yanna Indrayana, Hasan Amin, Fransisca Ika Mahardika

Kesmas

Cognitive dysfunction is an important consequence of ischemic stroke, which can progress in the first few years and is primarily determined by clinical factors. This study aimed to investigate the clinical determinants of cognitive dysfunction in stroke survivors in West Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. This cross-sectional study assessed 255 ischemic stroke survivors with a mean age of 57.1±9.3 years old and 29–79 years old, recruited consecutively in three main hospitals in West Nusa Tenggara Province between March 2019 and October 2021. Categorical data collected included age, sex, education level, clinical determinants of ischemic stroke, and cognitive status of the patients. …

Interprofessional Collaborative Practice And Health Workers Retention At Remote Primary Health Care: Case Study From Nusantara Sehat Team-Based Program, Prastuti Soewondo, Retno Pujisubekti, Ade Widyati Prastyani, Nurul Maretia Rahmayanti

Kesmas

The Nusantara Sehat Team (NST), established in 2015 and consist of multi-professional health workers, implemented to provide comprehensive services at remote primary health cares (PHCs) for two years. This study aimed to explore how the NST leverages the Interprofessional Collaboration (IPC) and its impact on the future career prospects of health workers. Using a qualitative approach, the information was gathered from 48 informants drawn from the current 30 NST recruits and 18 alumni through semi-structured interviews. Of these 48, 20 were clinical practitioners, while the rest were non-clinical health workers. The findings revealed several challenges in promoting collaborative practice, including …

Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (Bph): A Comprehensive Analysis Of The Malaise And Summarizing Possible Management Options Through Phytotherapeutic Agents, Shan Sasidharan, Kumarapillai Parameswaran Srinivasakumar, Sandeep Poddar, Amiya Bhaumik, Sreemoy Kanti Das, Hareendran Nair J

Kesmas

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a severe illness affecting middle-aged and geriatric male patients. This disease normally occurs at the age of 40 or above and is also associated with sexual dysfunction. Alpha-blockers and 5α-reductase inhibitors are the preferred drugs practiced to treat BPH. However, invasive surgical therapy remains the gold standard for managing the condition in the case of refractory and intricate BPH conditions. Due to the fear of sexual dysfunction and the detrimental influence on their quality of life, most patients seek to avoid synthetic drugs and surgery. For this reason, several patients turn to phytotherapy and other …

Treatment Adherence And Incidence Of Coronary Heart Disease In Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients, Ahmad Sahlan Baniu, Rani Sauriasari, Woro Riyadina, Pradana Soewondo

Kesmas

Previous studies showed that uncontrolled blood sugar and long-term use of several types of antidiabetic could increase the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). This study aimed to compare the incidence of CHD in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients showing treatment adherence and non-adherence behavior over four years. This was a retrospective cohort study with data sets obtained from the Bogor Cohort Study of Non-Communicable Disease Risk Factors. All study subjects were not diagnosed with CHD at the beginning of the study. The sample was divided into two groups; one had adhered to treatment from health centers and followed …

Local Wisdom Enriching Complementary Feeding Practices During Disaster Situations In Indonesia, Astuti Astuti, Happy Hayati, Fajar Tri Waluyanti, Dessie Wanda

Kesmas

This study aimed to analyze complementary food fulfillment during disaster situations in Indonesia since it frequently experiences natural disasters and young children face unique challenges related to their feeding needs in disaster situations. This qualitative case study based on the Mount Merapi eruption and Sumedang landslide in 2021 collected data using observations, forum group discussions, and in-depth interviews; then, a thematic analysis was conducted. This study involved 17 participants, including Non-governmental Organizations (NGO) activists, health workers, residents involved in making complementary foods, and primary caregivers of children aged 6–24 months. This study found that there were five themes generated from …

Muscle Dysmorphia In Fitness Center Members: Its Affecting Factors And Impacts, Deny Yudi Fitranti, Nurmasari Widyastuti, Etika Ratna Noer, Ayu Rahadiyanti, Fillah Fithra Dieny, Rachma Purwanti, Dewi Kurnia Sandi, Widya Destikasari

Kesmas

Muscle dysmorphia (MD) has several impacts on the decline in social and health functions. This study aimed to determine the correlation between MD with eating behaviors and exercise loading among fitness center members and analyze the factors affecting it. This study used a cross-sectional design with 100 subjects chosen by a consecutive sampling method at three fitness centers in Semarang City. The subjects were all male members of an active fitness center between 17 and 45 years. The data of MD were obtained using the Drive Muscular Scale (DMS), while eating behavior data were obtained using the Eating Attitude Test-40 …

Determinants Of The Coexistence Dual Form Of Malnutrition In Pairs Of Mother And Child Aged 6 – 59 Months In Bogor District 2019, Maulina Dwi Krismanita, Triyanti Triyanti, Ahmad Syafiq, Trini Sudiarti

Kesmas

The dual form of malnutrition (DFM) is defined as multiple nutritional problems in the same household and time. This study aimed to determine the related factor to DFM incidence in pairs of mothers and children aged 6–59 months in Bogor District in 2019. This cross-sectional study used secondary data on the Nutrition and Health of Babakan Madang Subdistrict Toddlers in 2019 and Nutrition Intake and Stunting of Children Under-Five in Bogor District, West Java Province, involving a total sample of 274 households. The dependent variable in this study was DFM, while the independent variables were maternal age during pregnancy, maternal …

The Influence Of Intrapersonal Constraints On Travel Intention Of People At High Risk From Covid-19 During The New Normal, Dyah Widiyastuti, Ikasari Kusuma Wardhani

Kesmas

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism constraints have created a challenge for inclusive tourism, especially for older people and people with comorbidities. This study examined intrapersonal constraints’ effect on the travel intentions of people facing fewer opportunities for tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which could disrupt their well-being fulfillment. The data were collected through an online survey of Jakarta citizens aged 46 years and older from the end of June to September 2021, and a total of 337 responses were accumulated. This study applied partial least square structural equation modeling to test the moderating effect of intrapersonal constraints toward …

Zoom Fatigue During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Is It Real?, Putri Winda Lestari, Adhila Fayasari

Kesmas

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused drastic changes to social lives moreover the activities done outside, such as work and school. The policy of large-scale social restrictions (LSRR)/Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar (PSBB), which makes people stay at home, also plays an important role in changing the face-to-face activity online. As a solution to the major change, people use video conferencing to keep in touch and still feel like doing "offline" activities. The increasing use of video conferencing has raised concerns about the resulting fatigue, termed "Zoom fatigue." This study aimed to describe Zoom fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic …

Diabetes Mellitus And Mortality Among Covid-19 Patients In Jakarta, March-August 2020, Endang Widuri Wulandari, Sudarto Rotnoatmodjo, Ngabila Salama

Kesmas

Diabetes mellitus (DM) comorbidity is one of the risk factors for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mortality. This study aimed to determine the association of comorbid DM and mortality among COVID-19 confirmed cases in DKI Jakarta Province, controlled with confounding variables from March to August 2020. The study design was a retrospective cohort using cox proportional hazard regression, with a total sample of 1,480. The data consisted of 740 COVID-19 cases with and 740 without comorbid DM. The inclusion criteria were COVID-19 confirmed cases with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory testing reported to the DKI Jakarta Provincial Department of Health, and …

Segmentation Of Infant Brain Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, Norah Saleh Alghamdi, Fatma Taher, Heba Kandil, Ahmed Sharafeldeen, Ahmed Elnakib, Ahmed Soliman, Yaser Elnakieb, Ali Mahmoud, Mohammed Ghazal, Ayman El-Baz

All Works

This study develops an atlas-based automated framework for segmenting infants' brains from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For the accurate segmentation of different structures of an infant's brain at the isointense age (6-12 months), our framework integrates features of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) (e.g., the fractional anisotropy (FA)). A brain diffusion tensor (DT) image and its region map are considered samples of a Markov-Gibbs random field (MGRF) that jointly models visual appearance, shape, and spatial homogeneity of a goal structure. The visual appearance is modeled with an empirical distribution of the probability of the DTI features, fused by their nonnegative matrix …