Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Progression Magazine, 2020 Spring/Summer, Coastal Carolina University

Progression Magazine

Magazine of the College of Science at Coastal Carolina University.

Dallas, Tx: The Staggering Wealth Gap, Macy Golman

School of Professional Studies

In the summer of 2019, I had the privilege of serving as an AmeriCorps member with an organization called Equal Heart. One of Equal Heart’s main initiatives was to provide meals to children in underserved populations, to make sure that without school in session, these children would still be receiving food. Unfortunately, in many instances, without these meals, many of the children we served would likely not know when they would be eating their next fulfilling meal. There were certain pockets of Dallas that we would travel to everyday, places that were fifteen minutes maximum from my house, but places …

Age At Migration And The Risk Of Psychotic Disorders: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis., Kelly K. Anderson, Jordan Edwards

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the existing evidence on the association between age at migration and the risk of psychotic disorders.

METHODS: Observational studies were eligible for inclusion if they presented data on the association between age at migration and the risk of psychotic disorders among first-generation migrant groups. We used two random effects meta-analyses to pool effect estimates for each stratum of age at migration relative to (i) a native-born reference category and (ii) the youngest age stratum (0 to 2 years).

RESULTS: Ten studies met inclusion criteria, and five were included in the meta-analysis. …

Novel Inference Methods For Generalized Linear Models Using Shrinkage Priors And Data Augmentation., Arinjita Bhattacharyya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Generalized linear models have broad applications in biostatistics and sociology. In a regression setup, the main target is to find a relevant set of predictors out of a large collection of covariates. Sparsity is the assumption that only a few of these covariates in a regression setup have a meaningful correlation with an outcome variate of interest. Sparsity is incorporated by regularizing the irrelevant slopes towards zero without changing the relevant predictors and keeping the resulting inferences intact. Frequentist variable selection and sparsity are addressed by popular techniques like Lasso, Elastic Net. Bayesian penalized regression can tackle the curse of …

Predicting Disease Progression Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks And Longitudinal Electronic Health Record Data, Seunghwan Kim

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely adopted and used throughout healthcare systems and are able to collect and store longitudinal information data that can be used to describe patient phenotypes. From the underlying data structures used in the EHR, discrete data can be extracted and analyzed to improve patient care and outcomes via tasks such as risk stratification and prospective disease management. Temporality in EHR is innately present given the nature of these data, however, and traditional classification models are limited in this context by the cross-sectional nature of training and prediction processes. Finding temporal patterns in EHR is especially …

Predicting Disease Progression Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks And Longitudinal Electronic Health Record Data, Seunghwan Kim

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely adopted and used throughout healthcare systems and are able to collect and store longitudinal information data that can be used to describe patient phenotypes. From the underlying data structures used in the EHR, discrete data can be extracted and analyzed to improve patient care and outcomes via tasks such as risk stratification and prospective disease management. Temporality in EHR is innately present given the nature of these data, however, and traditional classification models are limited in this context by the cross- sectional nature of training and prediction processes. Finding temporal patterns in EHR is …

Physical Therapy Nontreatment Events With Primary Physical Therapist, Stephen Johnson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Background: Physical therapy improves prognosis reduces stay and is generally helpful in aiding recovery from a wide range of ailments. Nontreatment rates occur for multiple reasons and are also related to the personalities of physical therapists.

Methods: We used data from a research project involving physical therapy at an acute care facility in our community. Our study focused on the retrospectively determined primary physical therapist for each patient. We used the chi-squared tests to compare nontreatment rates between days of the week and disease type and the reasons for nontreatment events. Repeated-measure models were used to evaluate the effect of …

Hdr Brachytherapy For Skin Cancer Using H.A.M. Applicator, Timothy Richard Thatcher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Skin cancer is the most common type of malignancy affecting both men and women in the United States. A majority of these cases are nonmelanoma skin cancers (NMSC) such as basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The goal of any skin cancer treatment is to cure the lesion itself while also preserving function and optimizing superficial cosmesis. High dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy provides an alternative to superficial x-ray or electron beam for skin cancer treatment. Utilizing an Iridium 192 source soldered to the end of a wire, surface dose can be administered at predetermined positions with sharper …

Mathematical Modeling Of Nonlinear Dynamics Of Blood Hormones On The Regulatory System, Gabriela Urbina

Theses and Dissertations

We study a mathematical modeling of nonlinear dynamics of blood hormones, which includes glucose and insulin. On Chapter I, II, III and IV, we introduce this work, analyze an effect of the secreted insulin by the pancreatic beta cells and glucagon hormones and state concluding remarks, respectively. This model considers the time evolution of nonlinear dynamics of the equations for glucose, glucagon and insulin concentrations plus insulin and glucagon actions and the secreted insulin as a result of elevation of glucose in the blood plasma. Using both analytical and numerical procedures, we determine such quantities using different parameters for different …

Use Of Eye-Tracking To Identify Psychological Indicators Of Sleepiness, Debasis Roy, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Matthew Thimgan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sleepiness or sleep deprivation creates a serious hazard or obstacle to task execution and performance. Sleep deprivation can be life-threating (e.g., when driving or executing attention-critical tasks). We are interested to examine if eye-tracking technology can be used to assess and detect sleepiness in an online environment. In this research proposal, we will focus on examining the relationships between sleepiness and parameters involving pupil size, blinks, and saccades.

Development Of Fully Balanced Ssfp And Computer Vision Applications For Mri-Assisted Radiosurgery (Mars), Jeremiah Sanders

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. Brachytherapy is a highly effective treatment option for prostate cancer, and is the most cost-effective initial treatment among all other therapeutic options for low to intermediate risk patients of prostate cancer. In low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy, verifying the location of the radioactive seeds within the prostate and in relation to critical normal structures after seed implantation is essential to ensuring positive treatment outcomes.

One current gap in knowledge is how to simultaneously image the prostate, surrounding anatomy, and radioactive seeds within the …

Equivalency Testing For Two Formulations Of A Clinical Laboratory Control Material, Jessica M. Hart

Capstone Experience: Master of Public Health

Clinical laboratory control materials are an integral part of legally-mandated and highly regulated quality control protocols in all clinical laboratories. These controls ensure accurate performance of the laboratory testing and instrumentation used to produce medical test results for millions of patients. It is of clinical and public health interest to ensure the diagnostic test results which affect so many people are regulated by the most accurate and precise controls.

Formulation changes in control materials have the potential to impact laboratory quality control. In this study, data from two formulations of a hematology control were compared to assess equivalency of the …

The Relationship Between Tree Canopy And Social Capital On Physical Activity In Unlv Students, Melissa Bartshe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Despite the numerous health benefits, rates of physical activity are low, especially among the college student population. Neighborhood tree canopy is one aspect of the built environment that has been shown to positively impact physical activity. Social capital has also been correlated with higher rates of physical activity. The sprawling urban design and arid desert climate of Las Vegas pose unique challenges to both tree canopy and social capital. Additionally, the relationship between tree canopy, social capital, and physical activity is understudied in the college student population. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship of tree canopy …

Association Of Visceral Adipose Tissue And Subclinical Atherosclerosis In Us-Born Mexican Americans But Not First Generation Immigrants, Clarence Gill, Miryoung Lee, Kristina Vatcheva, Nahid Rianon, Beverly Smulevitz, David D. Mcpherson, Joseph B. Mccormick, Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, Susan T. Laing

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Excess visceral adipose tissue (VAT) is a primary driver for the cardiometabolic complications of obesity; VATassociated cardiovascular disease risk varies by race, but most studies have been done on Non-Hispanics. This study aimed to evaluate the clinical and metabolic correlates of VAT, its association with subclinical atherosclerosis, and the factors affecting this association in Mexican Americans.

METHODS AND RESULTS: Participants (n=527) were drawn from the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC), on whom a carotid ultrasound to assess carotid intima media thickness and a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scan to assess for VAT were obtained. Those in the highest quartiles of …

The Effects Of Zoledronate And Sleep Deprivation On The Distal Femur Trabecular Thickness Of Ovariectomized Rats: Application Of Different Statistical Methods, Erin Nolte

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Osteoporosis is a disease that causes the degradation of bone, leading to an increased risk of fracture. 1 in 3 women over the age of 50 will be affected by Osteoporosis. This study aims to understand how bone is affected by sleep deprivation in estrogen-deficient rats, and how Zoledronate might negate the inimical effects of sleep deprivation on bone. As bone mineral density (BMD) is a crude evaluation of the architectural changes seen in Osteoporosis, trabecular thickness may serve as a better single evaluation of bone health. 31 Wistar female rats were ovariectomized and separated into 4 random groups. The …

On Privacy-Aware Escience Workflows, Khalid Belhajjame, Noura Faci, Zakaria Maamar, Vanilson Burégio, Edvan Soares, Mahmoud Barhamgi

All Works

© 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature. Computing-intensive experiments in modern sciences have become increasingly data-driven illustrating perfectly the Big-Data era. These experiments are usually specified and enacted in the form of workflows that would need to manage (i.e., read, write, store, and retrieve) highly-sensitive data like persons’ medical records. We assume for this work that the operations that constitute a workflow are 1-to-1 operations, in the sense that for each input data record they produce a single data record. While there is an active research body on how to protect sensitive data by, for instance, anonymizing datasets, …

Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy For Cocaine Detection, Kiersten Jo Mead

Chemistry

The detection of drugs of abuse using Raman spectroscopy is of particular interest to forensic researchers at the moment. Raman spectroscopy is highly specific, fast, non-destructive, and can be adapted for in-situ measurements, making it the ideal forensic technique. Researchers working under the guidance of Doctor Igor Lednev have been able to use UV resonance Raman spectroscopy to detect cocaine in oral fluid without the need for sample pretreatment. They were however unable to detect the cocaine at forensically relevant levels. To overcome this limitation, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) was used in this proof of concept study for the detection …

Early Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment With In-Home Sensors To Monitor Behavior Patterns In Community-Dwelling Senior Citizens In Singapore: Cross-Sectional Feasibility Study, Iris Rawtaer, Rathi Mahendran, Ee Heok Kua, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee Xian Tan, Tih-Shih Lee, Tze Pin Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Dementia is a global epidemic and incurs substantial burden on the affected families and the health care system. A window of opportunity for intervention is the predementia stage known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Individuals often present to services late in the course of their disease and more needs to be done for early detection; sensor technology is a potential method for detection.Objective: The aim of this cross-sectional study was to establish the feasibility and acceptability of utilizing sensors in the homes of senior citizens to detect changes in behaviors unobtrusively.Methods: We recruited 59 community-dwelling seniors (aged >65 years …

Who And When To Screen: Multi-Round Active Screening For Network Recurrent Infectious Diseases Under Uncertainty, Han-Ching Ou, Arunesh Sinha, Sze-Chuan Suen, Andrew Perrault, Alpan Raval, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Controlling recurrent infectious diseases is a vital yet complicated problem in global health. During the long period of time from patients becoming infected to finally seeking treatment, their close contacts are exposed and vulnerable to the disease they carry. Active screening (or case finding) methods seek to actively discover undiagnosed cases by screening contacts of known infected people to reduce the spread of the disease. Existing practice of active screening methods often screen all contacts of an infected person, requiring a large budget. In cooperation with a research institute in India, we develop a model of the active screening problem …

A Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases In A Region, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

In understanding the dynamics of the spread of an infectious disease, it is important to understand how a town’s place in a network of towns within a region will impact how the disease spreads to that town and from that town. In this article, we take a model for the spread of an infectious disease in a single town and scale it up to simulate a region containing multiple towns. The model is validated by looking at how adding additional towns and commuters influences the outbreak in a single town. We then look at how the centrality of a town …

Doubling Time Of The Covid-19 Epidemic By Province, China, Kamalich Muniz-Rodriguez, Gerardo Chowell, Chi-Hin Cheung, Dongyu Jia, Po-Ying Lai, Yiseul Lee, Manyun Liu, Sylvia Ofori, Kimberlyn M. Roosa, Lone Simonsen, Cecile Viboud, Isaac Fung

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

In China, the doubling time of the coronavirus disease epidemic by province increased during January 20–February 9, 2020. Doubling time estimates ranged from 1.4 (95% CI 1.2–2.0) days for Hunan Province to 3.1 (95% CI 2.1–4.8) days for Xinjiang Province. The estimate for Hubei Province was 2.5 (95% CI 2.4–2.6) days.

A Study Of Addiction: The Opioid Epidemic, An Analysis At The State And County Level, Jamey Van Dyke

Undergraduate Theses

Addictive diseases such as those stemming from the use of alcohol, cocaine and opioids lead to serious negative consequences at both the individual and societal level. Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in opioid prescriptions and addiction. The potential for addiction is related to factors that include genetics, prescriber behavior, user behavior and characteristics, in addition to environmental and systemic determinants. One measure of the seriousness of the opioid epidemic is the number of overdose deaths. In 2017, drug overdoses killed over seventy thousand Americans, and overdose deaths are projected to increase in the future. …

Estimating Population Immunity Without Serological Testing, Andrew Lesniewski

Publications and Research

We propose an approximate methodology for estimating the overall level of immunity against COVID-19 in a population that has been affected by the recent epidemic. The methodology relies on the currently available mortality data and utilizes the properties of the SIR model. We illustrate the application of the method by estimating the recent levels of immunity in 10 US states with highest case numbers of COVID-19.

How Can We Change Gut Microbiota For Healthy Lives?, Elizaveta Shmakova

Scientific Communication News

No abstract provided.

483— Effectiveness Of Mmr Vaccination In Orthodox Jewish Neighborhoods, Meenu Mundackal

GREAT Day Posters

Measles is a highly contagious disease, where large outbreaks arise by direct contact between susceptible (unvaccinated) and infectious individuals. Many Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods were affected by measles from 2018-2019. To quantify the vaccination effort on this susceptible population, a retrospective analysis was used to study the NYC and Rockland County populations using a differential equations model. A subsequent model, known as a realistically-structured network model, studied only the NYC population, in relation to typical household size. Vaccination strategies were applied to three cohorts: unvaccinated family members, members with 1 prior MMR dose, and members with 2 prior MMR doses. The …

484— Modeling Social Distancing Methods And Their Effectiveness In Combating The Spread Of Ebola, Rachel Fair

GREAT Day Posters

Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare but severe disease that is transmitted among humans through direct-contact with, and close proximity to, infected bodily fluids. From 2014-16, West Africa experienced the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, infecting over 28,000 people, and killing over 11,000. Although the symptoms of EVD are treatable, the disease can be extremely deadly, with an average of 50% EVD cases resulting in fatality. In areas where healthcare is scarce and vaccinations are not readily available, the practices of social distancing and self-quarantining have been shown to be highly effective in combating the spread of EVD. To …

465— Modeling Vaccine Efficacy For Tuberculosis In A Prison Population, Kaitlyn Mundackal

GREAT Day Posters

Tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease and is particularly problematic in confined communities such as prisons. I simulated how Tuberculosis moves through a prison population and tested how much vaccination effort is needed to control its spread. To explore this, I tested adding ever increasing numbers of randomly placed edges in a network and determined the size of the largest component. Afterwards, I removed edges in the model using two different methods, one illustrating if the edges were removed randomly and the other starting with prisoners that had the most connections, to simulate the effect of vaccination. My results show …

Volume 12, Haleigh James, Hannah Meyls, Hope Irvin, Megan E. Hlavaty, Samara L. Gall, Austin J. Funk, Karyn Keane, Sarah Ghali, Antonio Harvey, Andrew Jones, Rachel Hazelwood, Madison Schmitz, Marija Venta, Haley Tebo, Jeremiah Gilmer, Bridget Dunn, Benjamin Sullivan, Mckenzie Johnson

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction, Dr. Roger A. Byrne, Dean

From the Editor, Dr. Larissa "Kat" Tracy

From the Designers, Rachel English, Rachel Hanson

Immortality in the Mortal World: Otherworldly Intervention in "Lanval" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" by Haleigh James

Analysis of Phenolic Compounds in Moroccan Olive Oils by HPLC by Hannah Meyls

Art by Hope Irvin

The Effects of Cell Phone Use on Gameplay Enjoyment and Frustration by Megan E. Hlavaty, Samara L. Gall, and Austin J. Funk

Care, No Matter What: Planned Parenthood's Use of Organizational Rhetoric to Expand its Reputation by Karyn Keane

Analysis of Petroleum Products for …

A Study Of Cholera Transmission, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar

Open Educational Resources

A recent cholera outbreak in Haiti brought public attention to this disease. Cholera, a diarrheal disease, is caused by an intestinal bacterium, and if not addressed in a timely manner may become fatal. During the project described here, the students will learn how to solve and address a practical problem such as cholera transmission using various mathematical tools. Students will learn to develop a differential equation model based on practical scenarios, analyze the model using mathematics as well as numerical simulation, and finally describe the results in words that are understandable by the people who are not specialists in this …

Development Of Paper-Based Screen-Printed Carbon-Paste Electrode For Sensing Glucose For Diabetics, Yechan Hwang

19th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2020)

In recent years there have been many interests in developing paper based electrodes.[1] The purpose of this project is to develop a working paper-based electrode that can detect glucose via an enzyme and redox mediator (Tris(5-amino-1, 10-phenanthroline) Iron(II)). In the process of developing a paper-based electrode, cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were used as primary methods. The redox mediator was electropolymerized onto glassy carbon (GC) and carbon-paste electrodes (CPE) and their subsequent charge-transfer properties were characterized using CV and EIS. Cyclic voltammetry characterization studies of the electropolymerized films revealed excellent charge transfer properties with ΔEp ~0 mV. …