Data Science Commons^™

High-Frequency Ultrasound In Patients With Seronegative Rheumatoid Arthritis, Junkui Wang, Miao Wang, Qinghua Qi, Zhibin Wu, Jianguo Wen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This study aimed to investigate the value of high-frequency ultrasound (HFUS) in differentiation of the seronegative rheumatoid arthritis (SNRA) and osteoarthritis (OA) and in the diagnosis of SNRA. 83 patients diagnosed with SNRA (SNRA group) and 40 diagnosed with OA (OA group) who received HFUS were retrospectively analyzed. The grayscale (GS) scores, power Doppler (PD) scores, and bone erosion (BE)scores were recorded, and added up to calculate the total scores of US variables. The correlations of the total scores of US variables with the 28-joint disease activity score (DAS28), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and C-reactive protein (CRP) were analyzed. The …

Open-Source Benchmarking Of Ibd Segment Detection Methods For Biobank-Scale Cohorts, Kecong Tang, Ardalan Naseri, Yuan Wei, Shaojie Zhang, Degui Zhi

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

In the recent biobank era of genetics, the problem of identical-by-descent (IBD) segment detection received renewed interest, as IBD segments in large cohorts offer unprecedented opportunities in the study of population and genealogical history, as well as genetic association of long haplotypes. While a new generation of efficient methods for IBD segment detection becomes available, direct comparison of these methods is difficult: existing benchmarks were often evaluated in different datasets, with some not openly accessible; methods benchmarked were run under suboptimal parameters; and benchmark performance metrics were not defined consistently. Here, we developed a comprehensive and completely open-source evaluation of …

A Systematic Approach To Configuring Metamap For Optimal Performance, Xia Jing, Akash Indani, Nina Hubig, Hua Min, Yang Gong, James J Cimino, Dean F Sittig, Lior Rennert, David Robinson, Paul Biondich, Adam Wright, Christian Nøhr, Timothy Law, Arild Faxvaag, Ronald Gimbel

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: MetaMap is a valuable tool for processing biomedical texts to identify concepts. Although MetaMap is highly configurative, configuration decisions are not straightforward.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a systematic, data-driven methodology for configuring MetaMap for optimal performance.

METHODS: MetaMap, the word2vec model, and the phrase model were used to build a pipeline. For unsupervised training, the phrase and word2vec models used abstracts related to clinical decision support as input. During testing, MetaMap was configured with the default option, one behavior option, and two behavior options. For each configuration, cosine and soft cosine similarity scores between identified entities and gold-standard terms were …

Intraoperative Localization And Preservation Of Reading In Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex, Oscar Woolnough, Kathryn M Snyder, Cale W Morse, Meredith J Mccarty, Samden D Lhatoo, Nitin Tandon

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: Resective surgery in language-dominant ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC) carries the risk of causing impairment to reading. Because it is not on the lateral surface, it is not easily accessible for intraoperative mapping, and extensive stimulation mapping can be time-consuming. Here the authors assess the feasibility of using task-based electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings intraoperatively to help guide stimulation mapping of reading in vOTC.

METHODS: In 11 patients undergoing extraoperative, intracranial seizure mapping, the authors recorded induced broadband gamma activation (70-150 Hz) during a visual category localizer. In 2 additional patients, whose pathologies necessitated resections in language-dominant vOTC, task-based functional mapping was …

Identifying Missing Is-A Relations In Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology, Maryamsadat Mohtashamian, Rashmie Abeysinghe, Xubing Hao, Licong Cui

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology (ORDO) provides a structured vocabulary encapsulating rare diseases. Downstream applications of ORDO depend on its accuracy to effectively perform their tasks. In this paper, we implement an automated quality assurance pipeline to identify missing is-a relations in ORDO. We first obtain lexical features from concept names. Then we generate related and unrelated feature sharing concept-pairs, where a feature sharing concept-pair can further generate derived term-pairs. If an unrelated and related feature sharing concept-pair generate the same derived term-pair, then we suggest a potential missing is-a relation between the unrelated feature sharing concept-pair. Applying this approach …

Privacy-Aware Estimation Of Relatedness In Admixed Populations, Su Wang, Miran Kim, Wentao Li, Xiaoqian Jiang, Han Chen, Arif Harmanci

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Estimation of genetic relatedness, or kinship, is used occasionally for recreational purposes and in forensic applications. While numerous methods were developed to estimate kinship, they suffer from high computational requirements and often make an untenable assumption of homogeneous population ancestry of the samples. Moreover, genetic privacy is generally overlooked in the usage of kinship estimation methods. There can be ethical concerns about finding unknown familial relationships in third-party databases. Similar ethical concerns may arise while estimating and reporting sensitive population-level statistics such as inbreeding coefficients for the concerns around marginalization and stigmatization.

RESULTS: Here, we present SIGFRIED, which makes …

The Evolving Privacy And Security Concerns For Genomic Data Analysis And Sharing As Observed From The Idash Competition, Tsung-Ting Kuo, Xiaoqian Jiang, Haixu Tang, Xiaofeng Wang, Arif Harmanci, Miran Kim, Kai Post, Diyue Bu, Tyler Bath, Jihoon Kim, Weijie Liu, Hongbo Chen, Lucila Ohno-Machado

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Concerns regarding inappropriate leakage of sensitive personal information as well as unauthorized data use are increasing with the growth of genomic data repositories. Therefore, privacy and security of genomic data have become increasingly important and need to be studied. With many proposed protection techniques, their applicability in support of biomedical research should be well understood. For this purpose, we have organized a community effort in the past 8 years through the integrating data for analysis, anonymization and sharing consortium to address this practical challenge. In this article, we summarize our experience from these competitions, report lessons learned from the events …

I-Climate: A “Clinical Climate Informatics” Action Framework To Reduce Environmental Pollution From Healthcare, Dean F Sittig, Jodi D Sherman, Matthew J Eckelman, Andrew Draper, Hardeep Singh

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Addressing environmental pollution and climate change is one of the biggest sociotechnical challenges of our time. While information technology has led to improvements in healthcare, it has also contributed to increased energy usage, destructive natural resource extraction, piles of e-waste, and increased greenhouse gases. We introduce a framework "Information technology-enabled Clinical cLimate InforMAtics acTions for the Environment" (i-CLIMATE) to illustrate how clinical informatics can help reduce healthcare's environmental pollution and climate-related impacts using 5 actionable components: (1) create a circular economy for health IT, (2) reduce energy consumption through smarter use of health IT, (3) support more environmentally friendly decision-making …

A Comprehensive Artificial Intelligence Framework For Dental Diagnosis And Charting, Tanjida Kabir, Chun-Teh Lee, Luyao Chen, Xiaoqian Jiang, Shayan Shams

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to develop artificial intelligence (AI) guided framework to recognize tooth numbers in panoramic and intraoral radiographs (periapical and bitewing) without prior domain knowledge and arrange the intraoral radiographs into a full mouth series (FMS) arrangement template. This model can be integrated with different diseases diagnosis models, such as periodontitis or caries, to facilitate clinical examinations and diagnoses.

METHODS: The framework utilized image segmentation models to generate the masks of bone area, tooth, and cementoenamel junction (CEJ) lines from intraoral radiographs. These masks were used to detect and extract teeth bounding boxes utilizing several …

Atomistic Measurement And Modeling Of Intrinsic Fracture Toughness Of Two-Dimensional Materials, Xu Zhang, Hoang Nguyen, Xiang Zhang, Pulickel M Ajayan, Jianguo Wen, Horacio D Espinosa

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Quantifying the intrinsic mechanical properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials is essential to predict the long-term reliability of materials and systems in emerging applications ranging from energy to health to next-generation sensors and electronics. Currently, measurements of fracture toughness and identification of associated atomistic mechanisms remain challenging. Herein, we report an integrated experimental-computational framework in which in-situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) measurements of the intrinsic fracture energy of monolayer MoS

The Benefits And Challenges Of Virtual Education For Interprofessional Teams In A Post-Covid Environment, Tiffany Champagne-Langabeer

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

There have been a series of disruptions in the healthcare environment since 2019, starting with the global pandemic [...].

The Impact Of Covid-19 On Opioid-Related Overdose Deaths In Texas, Karima Lalani, Christine Bakos-Block, Marylou Cardenas-Turanzas, Sarah Cohen, Bhanumathi Gopal, Tiffany Champagne-Langabeer

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States was facing an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths, clouding accurate inferences about the impact of the pandemic at the population level. We sought to determine the existence of increases in the trends of opioid-related overdose (ORO) deaths in the Greater Houston metropolitan area from January 2015 through December 2021, and to describe the social vulnerability present in the geographic location of these deaths. We merged records from the county medical examiner's office with social vulnerability indexes (SVIs) for the region and present geospatial locations of the aggregated ORO deaths. Time series analyses …

Scgwas: Landscape Of Trait-Cell Type Associations By Integrating Single-Cell Transcriptomics-Wide And Genome-Wide Association Studies, Peilin Jia, Ruifeng Hu, Fangfang Yan, Yulin Dai, Zhongming Zhao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: The rapid accumulation of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data presents unique opportunities to decode the genetically mediated cell-type specificity in complex diseases. Here, we develop a new method, scGWAS, which effectively leverages scRNA-seq data to achieve two goals: (1) to infer the cell types in which the disease-associated genes manifest and (2) to construct cellular modules which imply disease-specific activation of different processes.

RESULTS: scGWAS only utilizes the average gene expression for each cell type followed by virtual search processes to construct the null distributions of module scores, making it scalable to large scRNA-seq datasets. We demonstrated scGWAS in …

Federated Learning Algorithms For Generalized Mixed-Effects Model (Glmm) On Horizontally Partitioned Data From Distributed Sources, Wentao Li, Jiayi Tong, Md Monowar Anjum, Noman Mohammed, Yong Chen, Xiaoqian Jiang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVES: This paper developed federated solutions based on two approximation algorithms to achieve federated generalized linear mixed effect models (GLMM). The paper also proposed a solution for numerical errors and singularity issues. And showed the two proposed methods can perform well in revealing the significance of parameter in distributed datasets, comparing to a centralized GLMM algorithm from R package ('lme4') as the baseline model.

METHODS: The log-likelihood function of GLMM is approximated by two numerical methods (Laplace approximation and Gaussian Hermite approximation, abbreviated as LA and GH), which supports federated decomposition of GLMM to bring computation to data. To solve …

Preparation Of Core-Shell-Structured Rdx@Pvdf Microspheres With Improved Thermal Stability And Decreased Mechanical Sensitivity, Hulin Wu, Aifeng Jiang, Mengru Li, Yanyan Wang, Fangchao Zhao, Yanchun Li

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Reducing the sensitivity of high-energy simple explosives is the key technology in improving the practical application of high-energy insensitive powder. As the most widely used high-energy explosive, hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine (RDX) is limited in application due to its high sensitivity. In this work, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) was used as an energetic binder. Core-shell-structured RDX@PVDF microspheres are produced using electrospray assembly technology and fully characterized by thermogravimetric analysis, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, and mechanical sensitivity. Their thermal stability and mechanical sensitivity are directly related to the weight fraction of the added PVDF. Moreover, core-shell-structured RDX@PVDF microspheres …

Clinical Decision Support Malfunctions Related To Medication Routes: A Case Series, Adam Wright, Scott Nelson, David Rubins, Richard Schreiber, Dean F Sittig

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: To identify common medication route-related causes of clinical decision support (CDS) malfunctions and best practices for avoiding them.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Case series of medication route-related CDS malfunctions from diverse healthcare provider organizations.

RESULTS: Nine cases were identified and described, including both false-positive and false-negative alert scenarios. A common cause was the inclusion of nonsystemically available medication routes in value sets (eg, eye drops, ear drops, or topical preparations) when only systemically available routes were appropriate.

DISCUSSION: These value set errors are common, occur across healthcare provider organizations and electronic health record (EHR) systems, affect many different types of …

Complement Component C4 Structural Variation And Quantitative Traits Contribute To Sex-Biased Vulnerability In Systemic Sclerosis, Martin Kerick, Marialbert Acosta-Herrera, Carmen Pilar Simeón-Aznar, José Luis Callejas, Shervin Assassi, Susanna M Proudman, Mandana Nikpour, Nicolas Hunzelmann, Gianluca Moroncini, Jeska K De Vries-Bouwstra, Gisela Orozco, Anne Barton, Ariane L Herrick, Chikashi Terao, Yannick Allanore, Carmen Fonseca, Marta Eugenia Alarcón-Riquelme, Timothy R D J Radstake, Lorenzo Beretta, Christopher P Denton, Maureen D Mayes, Javier Martin

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Copy number (CN) polymorphisms of complement C4 play distinct roles in many conditions, including immune-mediated diseases. We investigated the association of C4 CN with systemic sclerosis (SSc) risk. Imputed total C4, C4A, C4B, and HERV-K CN were analyzed in 26,633 individuals and validated in an independent cohort. Our results showed that higher C4 CN confers protection to SSc, and deviations from CN parity of C4A and C4B augmented risk. The protection contributed per copy of C4A and C4B differed by sex. Stronger protection was afforded by C4A in men and by C4B in women. C4 CN correlated well with its …

Aging After Stroke: How To Define Post-Stroke Sarcopenia And What Are Its Risk Factors?, Sheng Li, Javier Gonzalez-Buonomo, Jaskiran Ghuman, Xinran Huang, Aila Malik, Nuray Yozbatiran, Elaine Magat, Gerard E Francisco, Hulin Wu, Walter R Frontera

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Sarcopenia, generally described as "aging-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function", can occur secondary to a systemic disease.

AIM: This project aimed to study the prevalence of sarcopenia in chronic ambulatory stroke survivors and its associated risk factors using the two most recent diagnostic criteria.

DESIGN: A cross-sectional observational study.

SETTING: A scientific laboratory.

POPULATION: Chronic stroke.

METHODS: Twenty-eight ambulatory chronic stroke survivors (12 females; mean age=57.8±11.8 years; time after stroke=76±45 months), hand-grip strength, gait speed, and appendicular skeletal muscle mass (ASM) were measured to define sarcopenia. Risk factors, including motor impairment and spasticity, were identified using regression …

Svat: Secure Outsourcing Of Variant Annotation And Genotype Aggregation, Miran Kim, Su Wang, Xiaoqian Jiang, Arif Harmanci

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Sequencing of thousands of samples provides genetic variants with allele frequencies spanning a very large spectrum and gives invaluable insight into genetic determinants of diseases. Protecting the genetic privacy of participants is challenging as only a few rare variants can easily re-identify an individual among millions. In certain cases, there are policy barriers against sharing genetic data from indigenous populations and stigmatizing conditions.

RESULTS: We present SVAT, a method for secure outsourcing of variant annotation and aggregation, which are two basic steps in variant interpretation and detection of causal variants. SVAT uses homomorphic encryption to encrypt the data at …

Diagnostic Value Of Ultrasound In Children With Transverse Testicular Ectopia, Wei Zhou, Shoulin Li, Hao Wang, Jianchun Yin, Xiaodong Liu, Junhai Jiang, Guanglun Zhou, Jianguo Wen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to investigate the diagnostic value of ultrasound in children's transverse testicular ectopia (TTE).

MATERIALS AND METHODS: We retrospectively studies all TTE cases diagnosed in our hospital from January 2017 to December 2021. All cases were evaluated by ultrasound examination and compared to physical examination and diagnostic laparoscopy results.

RESULTS: This study included 14 TTE patients in total, with a median age was 1.08 years. In the 14 TTE, physical examination found 10 TTE cases, of which nine testes were located in the opposite scrotum, one testis was located in the opposite groin, and the other four …

Development Of The Invasive Candidiasis Discharge [I Can Discharge] Model: A Mixed Methods Analysis, Jinhee Jo, Truc T Tran, Nicholas D Beyda, Debora Simmons, Joshua A Hendrickson, Masaad Saeed Almutairi, Faris S Alnezary, Anne J Gonzales-Luna, Edward J Septimus, Kevin W Garey

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Patients with invasive candidiasis (IC) have complex medical and infectious disease problems that often require continued care after discharge. This study aimed to assess echinocandin use at hospital discharge and develop a transition of care (TOC) model to facilitate discharge for patients with IC. This was a mixed method study design that used epidemiologic assessment to better understand echinocandin use at hospital discharge TOC. Using grounded theory methodology focused on patients given echinocandins during their last day of hospitalization, a TOC model for patients with IC, the invasive candidiasis [I Can] discharge model was developed to better understand discharge barriers. …

Video-Urodynamics Efficacy Of Sacral Neuromodulation For Neurogenic Bladder Guided By Three-Dimensional Imaging Ct And C-Arm Fluoroscopy: A Single-Center Prospective Study, Shuaishuai Shan, Wen Zhu, Guoxian Zhang, Qinyong Zhang, Yingyu Che, Jianguo Wen, Qingwei Wang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

To assess the efficacy of sacral neuromodulation (SNM) for neurogenic bladder (NB), guided by intraoperative three-dimensional imaging of sacral computed tomography (CT) and mobile C-arm fluoroscopy through video-urodynamics examination. We enrolled 52 patients with NB who underwent conservative treatment with poor results between September 2019 and June 2021 and prospectively underwent SNM guided by intraoperative three-dimensional imaging of sacral CT and mobile C-arm fluoroscopy. Video-urodynamics examination, voiding diary, quality of life questionnaire, overactive bladder symptom scale (OABSS) scoring, and bowel dysfunction exam were completed and recorded at baseline, at SNM testing, and at 6-month follow-up phases. Finally, we calculated the …

Identifying Candidate Genes And Drug Targets For Alzheimer’S Disease By An Integrative Network Approach Using Genetic And Brain Region-Specific Proteomic Data, Andi Liu, Astrid M Manuel, Yulin Dai, Brisa S Fernandes, Nitesh Enduru, Peilin Jia, Zhongming Zhao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 75 genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's disease (ad). However, how these variants function and impact protein expression in brain regions remain elusive. Large-scale proteomic datasets of ad postmortem brain tissues have become available recently. In this study, we used these datasets to investigate brain region-specific molecular pathways underlying ad pathogenesis and explore their potential drug targets. We applied our new network-based tool, Edge-Weighted Dense Module Search of GWAS (EW_dmGWAS), to integrate ad GWAS statistics of 472 868 individuals with proteomic profiles from two brain regions from two large-scale ad cohorts [parahippocampal gyrus …

Molecular Pathways Enhance Drug Response Prediction Using Transfer Learning From Cell Lines To Tumors And Patient-Derived Xenografts, Yi-Ching Tang, Reid T Powell, Assaf Gottlieb

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Computational models have been successful in predicting drug sensitivity in cancer cell line data, creating an opportunity to guide precision medicine. However, translating these models to tumors remains challenging. We propose a new transfer learning workflow that transfers drug sensitivity predicting models from large-scale cancer cell lines to both tumors and patient derived xenografts based on molecular pathways derived from genomic features. We further compute feature importance to identify pathways most important to drug response prediction. We obtained good performance on tumors (AUROC = 0.77) and patient derived xenografts from triple negative breast cancers (RMSE = 0.11). Using feature importance, …

Oral Nanomedicines For Sirna Delivery To Treat Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Jongyoon Shinn, Juyeon Lee, Seon Ah Lee, Seon Ju Lee, Ah Hyun Choi, Jung Seo Kim, Su Jin Kim, Hyo Jin Kim, Cherin Lee, Yejin Kim, Joohyeon Kim, Jonghee Choi, Byungchae Jung, Taeho Kim, Hyeontaek Nam, Hyungjun Kim, Yonghyun Lee

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

RNA interference (RNAi) therapies have significant potential for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Although administering small interfering RNA (siRNA) via an oral route is desirable, various hurdles including physicochemical, mucus, and cellular uptake barriers of the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) impede both the delivery of siRNA to the target site and the action of siRNA drugs at the target site. In this review, we first discuss various physicochemical and biological barriers in the GI tract. Furthermore, we present recent strategies and the progress of oral siRNA delivery strategies to treat IBD. Finally, we consider the challenges faced in the …

Delineating Covid-19 Immunological Features Using Single-Cell Rna Sequencing, Wendao Liu, Johnathan Jia, Yulin Dai, Wenhao Chen, Guangsheng Pei, Qiheng Yan, Zhongming Zhao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Understanding the molecular mechanisms of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pathogenesis and immune response is vital for developing therapies. Single-cell RNA sequencing has been applied to delineate the cellular heterogeneity of the host response toward COVID-19 in multiple tissues and organs. Here, we review the applications and findings from over 80 original COVID-19 single-cell RNA sequencing studies as well as many secondary analysis studies. We describe that single-cell RNA sequencing reveals multiple features of COVID-19 patients with different severity, including cell populations with proportional alteration, COVID-19-induced genes and pathways, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in single cells, and adaptation …

Pim1 Promotes Hepatic Conversion By Suppressing Reprogramming-Induced Ferroptosis And Cell Cycle Arrest, Yangyang Yuan, Chenwei Wang, Xuran Zhuang, Shaofeng Lin, Miaomiao Luo, Wankun Deng, Jiaqi Zhou, Lihui Liu, Lina Mao, Wenbo Peng, Jian Chen, Qiangsong Wang, Yilai Shu, Yu Xue, Pengyu Huang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Protein kinase-mediated phosphorylation plays a critical role in many biological processes. However, the identification of key regulatory kinases is still a great challenge. Here, we develop a trans-omics-based method, central kinase inference, to predict potentially key kinases by integrating quantitative transcriptomic and phosphoproteomic data. Using known kinases associated with anti-cancer drug resistance, the accuracy of our method denoted by the area under the curve is 5.2% to 29.5% higher than Kinase-Substrate Enrichment Analysis. We further use this method to analyze trans-omic data in hepatocyte maturation and hepatic reprogramming of human dermal fibroblasts, uncovering 5 kinases as regulators in the two …

Biomolecular Condensation: A New Phase In Cancer Research, Anupam K Chakravarty, Daniel J Mcgrail, Thomas M Lozanoski, Brandon S Dunn, David J H Shih, Kara M Cirillo, Sueda H Cetinkaya, Wenjin Jim Zheng, Gordon B Mills, S Stephen Yi, Daniel F Jarosz, Nidhi Sahni

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Multicellularity was a watershed development in evolution. However, it also meant that individual cells could escape regulatory mechanisms that restrict proliferation at a severe cost to the organism: cancer. From the standpoint of cellular organization, evolutionary complexity scales to organize different molecules within the intracellular milieu. The recent realization that many biomolecules can "phase-separate" into membraneless organelles, reorganizing cellular biochemistry in space and time, has led to an explosion of research activity in this area. In this review, we explore mechanistic connections between phase separation and cancer-associated processes and emerging examples of how these become deranged in malignancy.

SIGNIFICANCE: One …

Evaluation Of Vicinity-Based Hidden Markov Models For Genotype Imputation, Su Wang, Miran Kim, Xiaoqian Jiang, Arif Ozgun Harmanci

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: The decreasing cost of DNA sequencing has led to a great increase in our knowledge about genetic variation. While population-scale projects bring important insight into genotype-phenotype relationships, the cost of performing whole-genome sequencing on large samples is still prohibitive. In-silico genotype imputation coupled with genotyping-by-arrays is a cost-effective and accurate alternative for genotyping of common and uncommon variants. Imputation methods compare the genotypes of the typed variants with the large population-specific reference panels and estimate the genotypes of untyped variants by making use of the linkage disequilibrium patterns. Most accurate imputation methods are based on the Li-Stephens hidden Markov …

Assessing Age-Specific Vaccination Strategies And Post-Vaccination Reopening Policies For Covid-19 Control Using Seir Modeling Approach, Xia Wang, Hulin Wu, Sanyi Tang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

As the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, it is badly needed to develop vaccination guidelines to prioritize the vaccination delivery in order to effectively stop COVID-19 epidemic and minimize the loss. We evaluated the effect of age-specific vaccination strategies on the number of infections and deaths using an SEIR model, considering the age structure and social contact patterns for different age groups for each of different countries. In general, the vaccination priority should be given to those younger people who are active in social contacts to minimize the number of infections, while the vaccination priority should be given to the elderly …