Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Effects Of Extreme Climate Events On Tea (Camellia Sinensis) Functional Quality Validate Indigenous Farmer Knowledge And Sensory Preferences In Tropical China, Selena Ahmed, John Richard Stepp, Colin M. Orians, Timothy S. Griffin, Corene Matyas, Albert Robbat, Sean Cash, Dayuan Xue, Chunlin Long, Uchenna Unachukwu, Sarabeth Buckley, Edward J. Kennelly

Publications and Research

Climate change is impacting agro-ecosystems, crops, and farmer livelihoods in communities worldwide. While it is well understood that more frequent and intense climate events in many areas are resulting in a decline in crop yields, the impact on crop quality is less acknowledged, yet it is critical for food systems that benefit both farmers and consumers through high-quality products. This study examines tea (Camellia sinensis; Theaceae), the world’s most widely consumed beverage after water, as a study system to measure effects of seasonal precipitation variability on crop functional quality and associated farmer knowledge, preferences, and livelihoods. Sampling was conducted in …

The Santa Clara, 2014-10-02, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Generalized Theoretical Criteria For Annihilation Of Hiv-1 Virions During Haart, Frank Nani, Mingxian Jin

Math and Computer Science Faculty Working Papers

Aims: This paper is an elaborate and quantitative attempt to construct medically applicable mathematical models and derive criteria for efficacious Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) protocol for an AIDS patient. The patho-physiological dynamics of Human Immuno-deficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1) induced AIDS during HAART is modeled by a system of non-linear deterministic differential equations. The physiologically relevant and clinically plausible equations depict the dynamics of uninfected CD4+ T cells (x1), HIV-1 infected CD4+ T cells (x2), HIV-1 virions in the blood plasma (x3), HIV-1 specific CD8+ T cells (x4), and the concentration of HAART drug molecules (x5). The major objective …

Folate Targeted Agents For Diagnostic And Therapeutic Uses, Mekeda Carr

All Capstone Projects

Folic acid has been frequently exploited for target therapies geared toward overexpressed folate receptors on malignant cells. The folic acid/folate-receptor high affinity interaction can be used to not only target but image cancer cells. Folate-linked nanoparticles represent a potential new drug carrier for tumor cell-selective therapeutics. Folate targeting, nanoparticles in therapeutics, and cancer cell imaging will be outlined in this literature report.

Quantitative Modeling Of Spatiotemporal Systems: Simulation Of Biological Systems And Analysis Of Error Metric Effects On Model Fitting, James Hengenius

Open Access Dissertations

Understanding the biophysical processes underlying biological and biotechnological processes is a prerequisite for therapeutic treatments and technological innovation. With the exponential growth of computational processing speed, experimental findings in these fields have been complemented by dynamic simulations of developmental signaling and genetic interactions. Models provide means to evaluate "emergent" properties of systems sometimes inaccessible by reductionist approaches, making them test beds for biological inference and technological refinement.^ The complexity and interconnectedness of biological processes pose special challenges to modelers; biological models typically possess a large number of unknown parameters relative to their counterparts in other physical sciences. Estimating these parameter …

Evaluation Of Yttrium-90 Positron Emission Tomography Dosimetry, Katherine N. Tapp

Open Access Dissertations

Purpose: Radioembolization is a novel treatment which utilizes the liver's unique dual system blood supply to trap yttrium-90 (⁹⁰Y) microspheres in microvasculature near liver tumors. Radioembolization dose planning and dosimetry are based on crude, inaccurate assumptions due to the lack of knowledge of patient specific ⁹⁰Y microsphere distribution. In recent years, the very small 3.1867e-5 internal pair production decay branch of ⁹⁰Y has been shown to allow for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging following radioembolization. This work explores the accuracy and limitation of ⁹⁰Y PET imaging due to the extremely low signal to noise (SNR) …

Structured Deterministic Models Applied To Malaria And Other Endemic Diseases, Katia Patricia Vogt Geisse

Open Access Dissertations

This thesis includes modeling studies on three structured deterministic models. These models are used to study the disease dynamics of malaria or the joint disease dynamics of HIV and HSV-2. Each of the models includes multiple components containing individuals in various epidemiological classes for the purpose of addressing questions that are of interests to biologists and epidemiologists. Some of the compartments have a continuous age-structure, which is necessary for studying the specific biological questions under investigation.^ In Chapter 2 a chronological-age structured deterministic model for malaria is presented. The model includes the human and mosquito populations with the human population …

Hippi Care Hospital: Towards Proactive Business Processes In Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It was 2.35 am on a Saturday morning. Wiki Lim, process specialist from the Process Innovation Centre (PIC) of Hippi Care Hospital (HCH), desperately doodling on her notepad for ideas to improve service delivery at HCH’s Emergency Department (ED). HCH has committed to the public that its ED would meet the service quality criterion of serving 90% of A3 and A4 patients, non-emergency patients with moderate to mild symptoms, within 90 minutes of their arrival at the ED. The ED was not able to meet this performance goal and Dr. Edward Kim, the head of the ED at HCH, had …

Research: South Dakota State University, Fall 2014, Christie Delfanian, Dave Graves, Emily Weber

State of Discovery South Dakota State University's Research Magazine

CONTENTS:

Dietician seeks to reduce obesity among college-age students [Page] 2
Wind: Support for wind energy based in economic development [Page] 3
Berg leaves legacy of accomplishments [Page] 3
Soil: Improved soil condition increases moisture for crops [Page] 4
Microbial process increases soybean meal's protein power [Page] 5
Medgene develops vaccines using university technologies [Page] 6
BioSNTR funding boosts biotechnology in South Dakota [Page] 8
Scientists collaborate to combat avian influenza [Page] 8
Pharmacy students role-play as part of a health-care team [Page]10
Nursing research seeks to improve health care, reduce costs [Page 10]
Improving organic solar cell efficiency essential …

Electrophysiological Response To Omitted Stimulus In Sentence Processing, Hiroko Nakano, Mari-Anne Rosario, Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Lara Pierce, Sophie G. Tate

School of Science Faculty Works

The current study provides evidence that the absence of a syntactically expected item leads to a sustained cognitive processing demand. Event-related potentials were measured at the omission of a syntactically expected object argument in a speech sequence. English monolingual adults listened to paired sentences. The first sentence in the pair established a context. The second sentence provided a response to the first sentence that was either grammatically correct by containing an overt object argument in the form of a pronoun, or was syntactically unacceptable by omitting the expected object pronoun. Event-related potentials measured at the omission of the object argument …

Using Graphs To Characterize Nationwide Physician Referral Networks, Ding Tong, Shu-Xia Li, Isuru Ranasinghe, Sudhakar Nuti, Hongyu Zhao, Harlan Krumholz

Yale Day of Data

AIM:

Evaluating physician referral network characteristics can help to understand how physicians and hospitals interact to provide patient services within the US healthcare system and ultimately how this may influence patient outcomes.

METHOD:

We used the 2012-2013 national Physician Referral data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which consists of 73,071,804 pairs of referrals from one health provider to another in calendar year 2012 and the first two quarters of year 2013 within 30 days of care. These referrals are from 642,144 national-wide physicians and 4,811 hospitals. We obtained information for each provider, physician or hospital, from …

Stratified Meta-Analysis To Examine Data Biases In Lung Cancer Studies Of Refinery Workers, Sherman Selix

Yale Day of Data

Petroleum refineries employ a variety of workers who historically experienced different potentials for asbestos exposure depending on job tasks. Associations between petroleum refinery work and lung cancer related to occupational asbestos exposure have been quantified among various locations, corporations, and time periods. To combine the data from several individual refinery studies and examine an overall effect, a systematic review and stratified meta-analysis was employed. Using set search terms among four databases, 112 potential publications were identified, of which 29 qualified for meta-analysis. Risk estimates and confidence intervals were extracted from these publications to construct four separate datasets. Inverse variance weighting …

The Santa Clara, 2014-09-25, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Photos That Changed The World: Ted Talk Annotated Resource List, Chris Riehl

Undergraduate Research Award

No abstract provided.

Lung Flute Improves Symptoms And Health Status In Copd With Chronic Bronchitis: A 26 Week Randomized Controlled Trial, Sanjay Sethi, Jingjing Yin, Pamela K. Anderson

Biostatistics: Faculty Publications

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by mucus hypersecretion that contributes to disease related morbidity and is associated with increased mortality. The Lung Flute® is a new respiratory device that produces a low frequency acoustic wave with moderately vigorous exhalation to increase mucus clearance. We hypothesized that the Lung Flute, used on a twice daily basis will provide clinical benefit to patients with COPD with chronic bronchitis.

Methods: We performed a 26 week randomized, non-intervention controlled, single center, open label trial in 69 patients with COPD and Chronic Bronchitis. The primary endpoint was change in respiratory symptoms measured …

Quantitative Assessment Of Blood Coagulation By Cold Atmospheric Plasma, Caitlin Heslin, Daniela Boehm, Vladimir Milosavljevic, Michelle Laycock, Patrick J. Cullen, Paula Bourke

Articles

Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is produced by ionizing a chosen gas, thereby creating charged and reactive species. The reactive species generated are capable of inducing a range of biomedically relevant interactions including blood coagulation. However, the underlying biochemical processes of plasma-assisted blood coagulation are largely unknown, and data quantifying blood clot formation or the impact of system parameters on the intensity of the blood clot are scarce. In this study, blood coagulation was quantified by measuring hemoglobin absorbance. System parameters of the kINPen plasma jet were investigated and compared, including treatment time, distance from the plasma source and gas flow …

2014 Scas Annual Meeting Program

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Genotypic And Phenotypic Characterization Of Aerosolized Bacteria Collected From African Dust Events, Christina A. Wilson, Robin L. Brigmon, Chris Yeager, Garriet W. Smith, Shawn W. Polson

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

Twenty-one bacteria were isolated and characterized from air samples collected in Africa and the Caribbean by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Isolates were selected based on preliminary characterization as possible pathogens. Identification of the bacterial isolates was achieved using 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) profiling, the BIOLOG Microlog^® System (carbon substrate assay), and repetitive extragenic palindromic (REP)-PCR analysis. The majority of isolates (18/21) were identified as species of the genus Bacillus. Three isolates were classified within the Bacillus cereus senso lato group, which includes Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus thuringiensis, and Bacillus …

Scas Officers And Council Members 2014-2015

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Alterations In Gene Array Patterns In Dendritic Cells From Aged Humans, Jia-Ning Cao, Anshu Agrawal, Edward Sharman, Zhenyu Jia, Sudhir Gupta

Statistics Faculty Research

Dendritic cells (DCs) are major antigen-presenting cells that play a key role in initiating and regulating innate and adaptive immune responses. DCs are critical mediators of tolerance and immunity. The functional properties of DCs decline with age. The purpose of this study was to define the age-associated molecular changes in DCs by gene array analysis using Affymatrix GeneChips. The expression levels of a total of 260 genes (1.8%) were significantly different (144 down-regulated and 116 upregulated) in monocyte-derived DCs (MoDCs) from aged compared to young human donors. Of the 260 differentially expressed genes, 24% were down-regulated by more than 3-fold, …

How Do We Know? Paths To Wisdom, Place

PLACE Historical Documents

This document explains the PLACE theme at Linfield College for 2014-2015 (How Do We Know? Paths to Wisdom).

Inhibition Of The Thioesterase Activity Of Human Fatty Acid Synthase By 1,4- And 9,10-Diones, Herman H. Odens

Faculty Works

Fatty acid synthase (FASN) is the enzyme that synthesizes fatty acids de novo in human cells. Although FASN is generally expressed at low levels in most normal tissues, its expression is highly upregulated in many cancers. Consistent with this notion, inhibition of FASN activity has demonstrated potential to halt proliferation and induce cell death in vitro and to block tumor growth in vivo. Consequently, FASN is widely recognized as a valuable therapeutic target. In this report, we describe a variety of 1,4-quinones and 9,10- anthraquinones, including several natural compounds and some newly synthesized compounds, that potently inhibit the thioesterase (TE) …

An Efficient Certificateless Encryption For Secure Data Sharing In Public Clouds, Seung-Hyun Seo, Mohamed Yoosuf Mohamed Nabeel, Xiaoyu Ding, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

We propose a mediated certificateless encryption scheme without pairing operations for securely sharing sensitive information in public clouds. Mediated certificateless public key encryption (mCL-PKE) solves the key escrow problem in identity based encryption and certificate revocation problem in public key cryptography. However, existing mCL-PKE schemes are either inefficient because of the use of expensive pairing operations or vulnerable against partial decryption attacks. In order to address the performance and security issues, in this paper, we first propose a mCL-PKE scheme without using pairing operations. We apply our mCL-PKE scheme to construct a practical solution to the problem of sharing sensitive …

Exhibition Handlist, Kathleen M. Webb

Supplemental Media

In preparing for Imprints and Impressions, we ran across many interesting words that have fallen out of the general lexicon. With this booklet, we have brought one back: handlist. Dean Kathleen Webb ran across it in a 1944 booklet from the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Though the word no longer appears in most new dictionaries, it’s still in the Oxford English Dictionary:

A list of a particular type or category of things, presented in a readily consultable form; esp. a list of the books or manuscripts in a particular place, on a particular subject, etc.; …

The Use Of Geospatial Clustering In Analysing Health Risk Profile, Sue-Mae Yeo, Tin Seong Kam, Kai Xin Thia, Dan Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background & Hypothesis: The first law of geography states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. This study aims to demonstrate how local indicator of spatial association (LISA) statistics are used to group patients with similar chronic diseases into natural clusters of hotspots found within northern Singapore by incorporating the proximity of their home locations explicitly. Methods: Anonymised chronic patient data collected from Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in 2013 were used for analyses. The data was mapped based on patients' residential addresses. A layer of hexagonal grid objects, each with a …

Pharyngeal And Cervical Cancer Incidences Significantly Correlate With Personal Uv Doses Among Whites In The United States, Dianne E. Godar, Rong Tang, Stephen Merrill

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Because we found UV-exposed oral tissue cells have reduced DNA repair and apoptotic cell death compared with skin tissue cells, we asked if a correlation existed between personal UV dose and the incidences of oral and pharyngeal cancer in the United States. We analyzed the International Agency for Research on Cancer's incidence data for oral and pharyngeal cancers by race (white and black) and sex using each state's average annual personal UV dose. We refer to our data as ‘white’ rather than ‘Caucasian,’ which is a specific subgroup of whites, and ‘black’ rather than African-American because blacks from other countries …

Across-Speaker Articulatory Normalization For Speaker-Independent Silent Speech Recognition, Jun Wang, Ashok Samal, Jordan Green

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Silent speech interfaces (SSIs), which recognize speech from articulatory information (i.e., without using audio information), have the potential to enable persons with laryngectomy or a neurological disease to produce synthesized speech with a natural sounding voice using their tongue and lips. Current approaches to SSIs have largely relied on speaker-dependent recognition models to minimize the negative effects of talker variation on recognition accuracy. Speaker-independent approaches are needed to reduce the large amount of training data required from each user; only limited articulatory samples are often available for persons with moderate to severe speech impairments, due to the logistic difficulty of …

Fall 2014

Scientia

CSH progress notes; Alumna entrepreneur finds success at the intersection of chemistry and law; Lions, lycopods and laboratories: CSH students thrive in summer internships; Fielding a team for a mission to Mars; Professor Craig Klugman on the medical humanities; Lab Notes

Pattern Of Household Drug Storage, Retno Gitawati

Kesmas

Household storage of pharmaceutical is world-widely practice, including in Indonesia. The purpose of this study was to obtain the pattern of medicine storage, the sources and reasons of medicine kept in households. Acrosssectional survey was conducted on October 2011, involving 250 adult household respondents, randomly selected from three subdistricts in North Jakarta, and have approved the written consents, and interviewed with structured questionnaire. Data were performed in univariate and bivariate analysis with chi square test. The majority of household (82%) stored drugs at home; analgesic-antipyretic nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory was the type of drugs kept by mostly (76.1%) of household. Out of …