Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Dietary Inflammatory Index Is Not Associated With Gut Permeability Or Biomarkers Of Systemic Inflammation In Hiv Immunologic Non-Responders, Fat Malazogu, Rodney K. Rousseau, Nitin Shivappa Mbbs, Mph, Ph.D., Sanja Huibner, Sharon L. Walmsley, Colin M. Kovacs, Erika Benko, Robert J. Reinhard, Ron Rosenes, James R. Hébert, Rupert Kaul

Faculty Publications

Immunologic non-responders (INRs) are a subset of individuals living with HIV who have suboptimal blood CD4+ T cell recovery despite effective antiretroviral therapy (ART). They are at an increased risk of serious non-AIDS co-morbidities and death, and demonstrate enhanced systemic immune activation. In other populations diet has been correlated with markers of systemic inflammation through the Diet Inflammatory Index (DII), but this association has not been studied in persons living with HIV (PLWH). Blood was collected from 28 INR PLWH with a blood CD4+ T cell count <350/μL despite ≥2 years of effective ART. Participants completed a Canadian Diet History Questionnaire, and their responses were used to calculate the DII. Plasma inflammatory markers (IFNγ, TNF, IL-6, sVCAM, D-dimer, sCD14 and CRP) were assayed by ELISA, cellular immune activation (HLA-DR and CD38 on CD4+ and CD8+ T cells) was quantified using flow cytometry, and small bowel permeability assessed by calculation of the urine LacMan ratio after drinking a mix of lactulose and mannitol. Participants were a median age of 57 years, had been on effective ART for 15 years, and the median DII was −1.91 (range of −3.78 to +2.23). No correlation was observed between DII and plasma markers of inflammation, levels of T cell activation, gut permeability, or the biomarker of bacterial translocation sCD14. Self-reported alcohol intake, a potential confounder of the relationship between diet and inflammatory biomarkers, was also not associated with systemic inflammation or gut permeability. Our findings suggest that other mechanisms, rather than diet, are likely to be the major driver of systemic inflammation in INR individuals.

Association Between Diet Quality Indices And Incidence Of Type 2 Diabetes In The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study, Allison M. Hodge, Md Nazmul Karim, James Hébert Scd, Nitin Shivappa Mbbs, Mph, Ph.D., Barbora De Courten

Faculty Publications

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a common condition whose incidence is increasing worldwide, and for which obesity and diet are important risk factors. The aim of this study was to assess the association of three diet quality scores with diabetes risk and how much of the association was mediated through body size. The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study recruited 41,513 men and women aged 40–69 years during 1990–1994. At baseline, data were collected on lifestyle and diet, anthropometric measures were performed. Incident diabetes was assessed by self-report at follow-up surveys in 1994–1998 and 2003–2007. The associations between the dietary inflammatory index …

Critical Pedagogy In The Time Of Covid-19: Lessons Learned, Carol Christine Hordatt Gentles

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

The abrupt closure of universities due to the coronavirus pandemic caused unprecedented challenges for educators. They struggled to transition to online teaching almost overnight. This has raised questions about the readiness of Higher Education for digitalisation and hybridization of learning environments and focused attention on the renewal of teaching and learning models. It is incumbent upon those who practise critical pedagogy to join this conversation; the mandatory transition has raised difficult questions around how to ensure continuity of an agenda to offer students humanistic and democratic learning experiences in the new virtual reality. In this paper I offer a critical …

Book Review: The Death Project: An Anthology For These Times, Ted D. Ayres

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

A book review of The Death Project: An Anthology for These Times.

Ted Ayres, Social Justice And Education Advocate: "Making It Count" With Book Reviews, Kristen P. Erdem

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

This is an interview article with a prolific reviewer of books seen on public television and in print. Ted Ayres had an inspired legal career, and his advocacy continues to this day. The year 2020, like no other year in our recent U.S. history, was a raucous reckoning for an array of social justice issues. As this theme continues in 2021, it is heartwarming getting to know a quiet advocate in our midst. Meet Ted Ayres. Ayres will be a contributor to the journal with book reviews. This is an introduction to the person, Ted Ayres as social justice and …

How The Common School Has Failed Hispanic Children—Witnessing The Severe Regression Of Language English Proficient Learners During A Pandemic: Teaching During Covid-19, Yvonne S. Herrera

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

Personal reflection on the impacts of the common school on Hispanic children during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Hispanic children experienced less opportunities in becoming educated due to lack of accessible technology.

Overview: From The Desk Of The Guest Editor, Tonya Huber

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

Overview from the Guest Editor on this special issue on the impacts of Covid-19 in educational settings. One theme explored in the contents of this issue is the powerlessness many educators felt as the editors set out to hear, comprehend, represent, and amplify their experiences. Other themes include: appreciation and empathy, focusing on what matters, and new ways of teaching with technology.

Spatial Distribution Of Pm2.5-Related Premature Mortality In China, Sheng Zheng, Uwe Schlink, Kin-Fai Ho, Ramesh P. Singh, Andrea Pozzer

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

PM_2.5 is a major component of air pollution in China and has a serious threat to public health. It is very important to quantify spatial characteristics of the health effects caused by outdoor PM_2.5 exposure. This study analyzed the spatial distribution of PM_2.5 concentration (45.9 μg/m³ national average in 2016) and premature mortality attributed to PM_2.5 in cities at the prefectural level and above in China in 2016. Using the Global Exposure Mortality Model (GEMM), the total premature mortality in China was estimated to be 1.55 million persons, and the per capita mortality was 11.2 …

Using Deep Learning To Predict The Path Of A Shuttlecock In Badminton, Sachleen Singh

Student Theses and Dissertations

With this thesis we intend to predict the movement of the shuttlecock given ten frames of a video for the each of the next ten frames. We also present a new regression model for the prediction of the frames called PIFR [Present Imputation and Future Regression] which consists of two models prepared for the same. Both the models try to predict the “future” position of the shuttlecock, the players and their rackets. There are two parts of the prediction network: An object detection stage based YOLO and the regression model. [40]

Evaluation Of The United States Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation Strategy, Md Rafiul Islam, Tamer Oraby, Audrey Mccombs, Mohammad Mihrab Chowdhury, Mohammad Al-Mamun, Michael G. Tyshenko, Claus Kadelkai

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Background: Anticipating an initial shortage of vaccines for COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States developed priority vaccine allocations for specific demographic groups in the population. This study evaluates the performance of the CDC vaccine allocation strategy with respect to multiple potentially competing vaccination goals (minimizing mortality, cases, infections, and years of life lost (YLL)), under the same framework as the CDC allocation: four priority vaccination groups and population demographics stratified by age, comorbidities, occupation and living condition (congested or non-congested).

Methods and findings: We developed a compartmental disease model that incorporates key elements of the …

Automated Classification Model With Otsu And Cnn Method For Premature Ventricular Contraction Detection, Liang-Hung Wang, Lin-Juan Ding, Chao-Xin Xie, Su-Ya Jiang, I-Chun Kuo, Xin-Kang Wang, Jie Gao, Pao-Cheng Huang, Patricia Angela R. Abu

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is one of the most common arrhythmias which can cause palpitation, cardiac arrest, and other symptoms affecting the work and rest activities of a patient. However, patients hardly decipher their own feelings to determine the severity of the disease thus, requiring a professional medical diagnosis. This study proposes a novel method based on image processing and convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract electrocardiography (ECG) curves from scanned ECG images derived from clinical ECG reports, and segment and classify heartbeats in the absence of a digital ECG data. The ECG curve is extracted using a comprehensive algorithm …

A 6-Cpg Validated Methylation Risk Score Model For Metabolic Syndrome: The Hypergen And Goldn Studies, Bertha A. Hidalgo, Bre Minniefield, Amit Patki, Rikki Tanner, Minoo Bagheri, Hemant K. Tiwari, Donna K. Arnett, Marguerite Ryan Irvin

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

There has been great interest in genetic risk prediction using risk scores in recent years, however, the utility of scores developed in European populations and later applied to non-European populations has not been successful. The goal of this study was to create a methylation risk score (MRS) for metabolic syndrome (MetS), demonstrating the utility of MRS across race groups using cross-sectional data from the Hypertension Genetic Epidemiology Network (HyperGEN, N = 614 African Americans (AA)) and the Genetics of Lipid Lowering Drugs and Diet Network (GOLDN, N = 995 European Americans (EA)). To demonstrate this, we first selected cytosine-guanine dinucleotides …

Modeling, Analysis And Simulation Of Covid-19 Interaction Dynamics Between Local Community In Saudi Arabia And Visiting Sub-Population, Manal Badgaish, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Estimation Analysis For The Seir Model With Stochastic Perturbation For The Covid-19 Outbreak In Bogotá, Viswanathan Arunachalam, Andres Rios-Gutierrez

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Statistical Modeling Of Sars-Cov-2 Mutation In The U.S., Yuru Jing, Angela Antonou

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Using Parameter Estimation For Mathematical Model Predicting Pediatric Scd Pain, Quindel Jones

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Mathematical Model For Understanding The Spread Of Covid-19 In Saudi Arabia With Access To Vaccination, Maha Alshabrawi

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

3-Dimensional Agent-Based Model Of Neural Activity In The Central Nucleus Of The Amygdala During Pain, Carley Reith, Rachael Neilan, Benedict Kolber

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Mathematical Modeling And Analysis Of Covid-19 Epidemic With Vaccination, Caitlin Seibel, Tina Huang, Jackson Reisman, Erika Johanna Martinez Salinas, Viswanathan Arunachalam, Moatlhodi Kgosimore, Anuj Mubayi, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, Allen Bone Sehunelo

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Using Adaptive Research Design To Define The Proper Methodology To Use A Data Peek For Power: Step By Step Process, Tom Wasser

Advances in Clinical Medical Research and Healthcare Delivery

When planning or conducting research in the hospital setting, often termed Real-World Environment (RWE), therapeutic assumptions and outcomes are often different than in the Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) where medications, devices and therapies are tested and developed. This is because RWE research has a lack of experimental control, additional confounding due to patient complications and comorbid conditions, lack of pure patient selection and compliance with therapy in the patients being treated and many other factors as well. However, when RWE experiments are conducted, sample size determination using data from the RCT is common because that is the only data that …

Treatment Selection Using Prototyping In Latent-Space With Application To Depression Treatment, Akiva Kleinerman, Ariel Rosenfeld, David Benrimoh, Robert Fratila, Caitrin Armstrong, Joseph Mehltretter, Eliyahu Shneider, Amit Yaniv-Rosenfeld, Jordan Karp, Charles F. Reynolds, Gustavo Turecki, Adam Kapelner

Publications and Research

Machine-assisted treatment selection commonly follows one of two paradigms: a fully personalized paradigm which ignores any possible clustering of patients; or a sub-grouping paradigm which ignores personal differences within the identified groups. While both paradigms have shown promising results, each of them suffers from important limitations. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning-based treatment selection approach that is shown to strike a balance between the two paradigms using latent-space prototyping. Our approach is specifically tailored for domains in which effective prototypes and sub-groups of patients are assumed to exist, but groupings relevant to the training objective are not …

Artificial Intelligence Algorithms For Medical Imaging And Healthcare, Jonathan William Stubblefield

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we studied several applications of artificial intelligence applications to healthcare. In the first chapter, we examined a machine learning algorithm for classifying patients presenting to the emergency department with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Patients presenting with this life-threatening condition require a quick and accurate assessment of whether the condition is infectious or cardiac in etiology as the treatments for these etiologies of ARDS differ significantly. We used a transfer learning approach to develop our model. The model used a combination of clinical data and a chest x-ray as its input and achieved an accuracy 0.675 on …

Biotinylation As A Tool To Enhance The Uptake Of Small Molecules In Gram-Negative Bacteria, Ankit Pandeya, Ling Yang, Olaniyi Alegun, Chamikara Karunasena, Chad Risko, Zhenyu Li, Yinan Wei

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern. The shrinking selection of effective antibiotics and lack of new development is making the situation worse. Gram-negative bacteria more specifically pose serious threat because of their double layered cell envelope and effective efflux systems, which is a challenge for drugs to penetrate. One promising approach to breach this barrier is the “Trojan horse strategy”. In this technique, an antibiotic molecule is conjugated with a nutrient molecule that helps the antibiotic to enter the cell through dedicated transporters for the nutrient. Here, we explored the approach using biotin conjugation with a florescent molecule …

Investigating The Growth Of Algae Under Low Atmospheric Pressures For Potential Food And Oxygen Production On Mars, Leena M. Cycil, Elisabeth M. Hausrath, Douglas W. Ming, Christopher T. Adcock, James Raymond, Daniel Remias, Warren P. Ruemmele

Geoscience Faculty Research

With long-term missions to Mars and beyond that would not allow resupply, a self-sustaining Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) is essential. Algae are promising candidates for BLSS due to their completely edible biomass, fast growth rates and ease of handling. Extremophilic algae such as snow algae and halophilic algae may also be especially suited for a BLSS because of their ability to grow under extreme conditions. However, as indicated from over 50 prior space studies examining algal growth, little is known about the growth of algae at close to Mars-relevant pressures. Here, we explored the potential for five algae species …

Managing Incomplete Data In The Patient Discharge Summary To Support Correct Hospital Reimbursements, Fadi Naser Eddin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The patient discharge summary is a document that conveys the patient's story to other healthcare practitioners, external users, and, most importantly from a financial perspective, health insurers. A defect or incompleteness in the patient's discharge summary will result in delays in the collection process through denial of the entire or partial reimbursement claim or, in the best-case scenario, delay until the discharge summary issue is resolved. The purpose of this project is to address the issue of the incompleteness of discharge summary from the perspective of healthcare providers, with the goal of understanding, diagnosing, and intervening in the research problem. …

Association Between Neighborhood Social Deprivation And Stage At Diagnosis Among Breast Cancer Patients In South Carolina, Oluwole Adeyemi Babatunde, Whitney Zahnd Ph.D., Jan Eberth Ph.D., Andrew B. Lawson, Swann Arp Adams, Eric Adjei Boakye, Melanie S. Jefferson, Caitlin G. Allen, John L. Pearce, Hong Li, Chanita Hughes Halbert

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between neighborhood social deprivation and individual-level characteristics on breast cancer staging in African American and white breast cancer patients. We established a retrospective cohort of patients with breast cancer diagnosed from 1996 to 2015 using the South Carolina Central Cancer Registry. We abstracted sociodemographic and clinical variables from the registry and linked these data to a county-level composite that captured neighborhood social conditions—the social deprivation index (SDI). Data were analyzed using chi-square tests, Student’s t-test, and multivariable ordinal regression analysis to evaluate associations. The study sample included 52,803 female patients …

Genomics Of Postprandial Lipidomics In The Genetics Of Lipid-Lowering Drugs And Diet Network Study, Marguerite R. Irvin, May E. Montasser, Tobias Kind, Sili Fan, Dinesh K. Barupal, Amit Patki, Rikki M. Tanner, Nicole D. Armstrong, Kathleen A. Ryan, Steven A. Claas, Jeffrey R. O’Connell, Hemant K. Tiwari, Donna K. Arnett

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Postprandial lipemia (PPL) is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Inter-individual variation in the dietary response to a meal is known to be influenced by genetic factors, yet genes that dictate variation in postprandial lipids are not completely characterized. Genetic studies of the plasma lipidome can help to better understand postprandial metabolism by isolating lipid molecular species which are more closely related to the genome. We measured the plasma lipidome at fasting and 6 h after a standardized high-fat meal in 668 participants from the Genetics of Lipid-Lowering Drugs and Diet Network study (GOLDN) using ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled …

Verrucous Carcinoma Of The Vulva: Patterns Of Care And Treatment Outcomes., Sara M. Dryden, Leonid B. Reshko, Jeremy T. Gaskins, Scott R. Silva

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Background: Verrucous vulvar carcinoma (VC) is an uncommon and distinct histologic subtype of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The available literature on VC is currently limited to case reports and small single institution studies. Aims: The goals of this study were to analyze data from the National Cancer Database (NCDB) to quantitate the incidence of VC and to investigate the effects of patient demographics, tumor characteristics, and treatment regimens on overall survival (OS) in women with verrucous vulvar carcinoma. Methods and results: Patients diagnosed with vulvar SCC or VC between the years of 2004 and 2016 were identified in the NCDB. …

The Temperature-Dependent Conformational Ensemble Of Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease (Mpro), Ali Ebrahim, Blake T. Riley, Desigan Kumaran, Babak Andi, Martin R. Fuchs, Sean Mcsweeney, Daniel A. Keedy

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic, instigated by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, continues to plague the globe. The SARS-CoV-2 main protease, or M^pro, is a promising target for development of novel antiviral therapeutics. Previous X-ray crystal structures of M^pro were obtained at cryogenic temperature or room temperature only. Here we report a series of high-resolution crystal structures of unliganded M^pro across multiple temperatures from cryogenic to physiological, and another at high humidity. We interrogate these datasets with parsimonious multiconformer models, multi-copy ensemble models, and isomorphous difference density maps. Our analysis reveals a temperature-dependent conformational landscape for M^pro, including …

Differences By School Location In Summer And School Monthly Weight Change: Findings From A Nationally Representative Sample, Ethan T. Hunt, Bridget Armstrong Ph.D., Gabrielle Turner-Mcgrievy Ph.D., Rd, Michael Beets Med, Mph, Phd, Robert Weaver Med, Phd

Faculty Publications

Objectives: To examine changes in accelerations of Body Mass Index (BMI), age-and-sex specific body mass index (zBMI), and 95th percentile of BMI (%BMIp95) during the summer months and school year by school location designation (i.e., urban, suburban, exurban). This study utilized the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011.

Methods: Of the 18,174 children in the ECLS-K:2011 dataset, I restricted participants to those with at least two consecutive measures that occurred August/September or April/May. Mixed-effect regression analyses estimated differences in monthly change in BMI, zBMI, and %BMIp95 between the summer and school year while accounting for the ECLS-K complex …