Biostatistics Commons^™

Developing A New Tool For Early Detection Of The Nutritional And Health Risk Factors Of Urban Workers’ Productivity, Hildagardis Meliyani Erista Nai, Arimbi Karunia Estri, Christina Ririn Widianti

Kesmas

Nutrition and health play vital roles in work productivity. This study aimed to develop a risk self-assessment tool called Early Detection of the Nutritional and Health Risk Factors on the productivity of urban workers. This study was conducted in two stages: 1) the development of the tool to determine the nutritional and health risk factors that affect productivity based on literature reviews and scoring systems and 2) the testing of validity and reliability. Finally, the tool contained 63 items, including 28 items on nutritional risk factors and 35 on health risk factors. The validity of the tool was assessed using …

Obesity And Asthma Risk In Indonesian Adults: Findings From The 2018 Indonesia Basic Health Research, Hoirun Nisa

Kesmas

Obesity and asthma are both global public health challenges. Mounting evidence suggests that obesity may increase asthma risk in adults; however, the association by sex remains uncertain. This study examined the association of obesity with asthma risk in Indonesian adult men and women. Data were obtained from the 2018 Indonesia Basic Health Research. The analysis included 299,837 men and 333,218 women aged ≥18 years. Asthma was identified by the self-report of a doctor’s diagnosis. Obesity was defined as a body mass index ≥30 kg/m2. A logistic regression was used for data analysis. Asthma prevalence was 2.7% (2.5% in men and …

Maternal And Child Health Handbook Utilization, Quantity And Quality Of Antenatal Services, And Maternal Emergency Rates In Padang City In 2022, Rena Afri Ningsih, Yusrawati Yusrawati, Joserizal Serudji

Kesmas

This study analyzed the relationship between the utilization of the Indonesian Ministry of Health’s Maternal and Child Health Handbook and the quantity and quality of antenatal care to maternal emergency levels. This study applied mixed methods with a consecutive sampling technique and included 108 mothers undergoing maternal emergencies at a central general hospital (quantitative) and eight mothers, seven midwives, and five cadres at primary health cares (qualitative) as informants. The result showed a relationship between the utilization of the Maternal and Child Health Care Handbook (p-value = 0.043), the quantity of antenatal care (p-value

The Determinants Of Stunting In The Under-Five In Three Municipalities In The Special Capital Region Of Jakarta, Tria Astika Endah Permatasari, Chairunnisa Chairunnisa, Hernani Djarir, Lily Herlina, Munaya Fauziah, Andriyani Andriyani, Yudi Chadirin

Kesmas

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global decline in public health status. This study aimed to analyze the determinants of stunting in the under-five in three municipalities in the Special Capital Region of Jakarta, Indonesia. A cross-sectional study was conducted in August-December 2020 with 460 pairs of mothers and children selected by simple random sampling. Stunting was measured using a conventional anthropometric index (length/height-for-age), and anthropometric failure was measured using the Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure. The prevalence of stunting, underweight, and wasting was 41.5%,35%, and 19.8%, respectively, and 62% of the under-five experienced anthropometric failure. The dominant factor associated …

Turnover, Covid-19, And Reasons For Leaving And Staying Within Governmental Public Health, Jonathan P. Leider, Gulzar H. Shah, Valerie A. Yeager, Jingjing Yin, Kusuma Madamala

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Background and Objectives:

Public health workforce recruitment and retention continue to challenge public health agencies. This study aims to describe the trends in intention to leave and retire and analyze factors associated with intentions to leave and intentions to stay.

Design:

Using national-level data from the 2017 and 2021 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Surveys, bivariate analyses of intent to leave were conducted using a Rao-Scott adjusted chi-square and multivariate analysis using logistic regression models.

Results:

In 2021, 20% of employees planned to retire and 30% were considering leaving. In contrast, 23% of employees planned to retire and 28% …

Probabilistic Methods For Inferring The Order Of Pathway Alterations During Carcinogenesis And Cancer Subtype Classification, Menghan Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

Carcinogenesis is a complex process involving somatic mutations in a number of key biological pathways. Studying cancer evolution is an important task which contributes to better understanding of cancer biology and facilitates identification of new therapeutic targets. We focus on two important questions in cancer evolution. The first question is to delineating the temporal order of pathway mutations during tumorigenesis. And the other question is to cluster patients into biologically meaningful cancer subtypes. We present new statistical methods to 1)leverage functional annotations of mutations to enhance estimation of the order of pathway mutations during carcinogenesis, 2) incorporate intra-tumoral heterogeneity information …

High Dimensional Data Analysis: Variable Screening And Inference, Lei Fang

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

This dissertation focuses on the problem of high dimensional data analysis, which arises in many fields including genomics, finance, and social sciences. In such settings, the number of features or variables is much larger than the number of observations, posing significant challenges to traditional statistical methods.

To address these challenges, this dissertation proposes novel methods for variable screening and inference. The first part of the dissertation focuses on variable screening, which aims to identify a subset of important variables that are strongly associated with the response variable. Specifically, we propose a robust nonparametric screening method to effectively select the predictors …

Striving For Appropriate Antibiotic Use: A Biomarker Initiative, And Outcomes Associated With Azithromycin Exposure, Amanda Gusovsky

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

The introduction of antibiotics into clinical practice is considered the greatest medical breakthrough of the 20^thcentury. However, the use of antibiotics can contribute to the development of resistance. In the United States (U.S.), approximately 2.8 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Moreover, some antibiotics are known to cause cardiac side effects including QT prolongation, hypotension, and ventricular arrythmias. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines appropriate antibiotic use as the effort to use “the right antibiotic, at the right dose, for the right …

Potential Alzheimer's Disease Plasma Biomarkers, Taylor Estepp

Theses and Dissertations--Epidemiology and Biostatistics

In this series of studies, we examined the potential of a variety of blood-based plasma biomarkers for the identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression and cognitive decline. With the end goal of studying these biomarkers via mixture modeling, we began with a literature review of the methodology. An examination of the biomarkers with demographics and other health factors found evidence of minimal risk of confounding along the causal pathway from biomarkers to cognitive performance. Further study examined the usefulness of linear combinations of biomarkers, achieved via partial least squares (PLS) analysis, as predictors of various cognitive assessment scores and clinical …

Economics Of Maple Syrup Production In Kentucky, Bobby Thapa

Theses and Dissertations--Forestry and Natural Resources

Maple syrup production is traditionally associated with New England regions in the United States, but there is growing interest in expanding it to other regions with suitable environmental conditions, including Kentucky. This study presents an in-depth analysis of the potential production and economic impacts of maple syrup in Kentucky using a multi-method approach. First, the study applies a stochastic production model to assess the effects of climatic and tree variables on maple syrup yield. The results reveal that several variables, including the number of maple trees, taps, temperatures, tapping season length, and time, significantly affect maple syrup yield. Second, input-output …

Expectile Neural Networks For Genetic Data Analysis Of Complex Diseases, Jinghang Lin, Xiaoran Tong, Chenxi Li, Qing Lu

Biostatistics Faculty Publications

The genetic etiologies of common diseases are highly complex and heterogeneous. Classic methods, such as linear regression, have successfully identified numerous variants associated with complex diseases. Nonetheless, for most diseases, the identified variants only account for a small proportion of heritability. Challenges remain to discover additional variants contributing to complex diseases. Expectile regression is a generalization of linear regression and provides complete information on the conditional distribution of a phenotype of interest. While expectile regression has many nice properties, it has rarely been used in genetic research. In this paper, we develop an expectile neural network (ENN) method for genetic …

Deep Learning-Based Technique For The Perception Of The Cervical Cancer, Aya Haraz, Hossam El-Din Moustafa, Abeer Twakol Khaleel, Ahmed H. Eltanboly

Mansoura Engineering Journal

In third-world countries, cervical cancer is the most prevalent and leading cause of death. It is affected by a variety of factors, including smoking, poor nutritional status, immunological inadequacy, and prolonged use of contraception. The Pap smear test, which is intended to prevent cervical cancer, finds preneoplastic changes in cervical epithelial cells. This study framework classified cervical cancer cells from Pap smears into five specified cell types using machine learning-based classification algorithms. The SIPaKMeD database is used in this investigation. This public dataset, which was manually cropped from 966 cluster cell images taken from Pap smear slides, has 4045 isolated …

Novel Feature Evaluation In Ultra-High Dimensional Right-Censored Data, With Applications To Head And Neck Cancer, Atika Farzana Urmi

Graduate Research Posters

Background: Head and neck cancer is the 6th most common cancer worldwide with an expected 1.08 million new cases each year. Such cancer data are ultra-high dimensional with thousands of clinical features and gene expressions, making it challenging for the traditional analytical tools to extract the potential biomarker for the cancer survival and control false discoveries. In addition, presence of heavy censoring can affect the screening procedures based on Kaplan-Meier (K-M) survival estimates.

Aim: To propose a model free, ultra-high dimensional feature screening method with two-dimensional survival outcome allowing false discovery rate (FDR) control.

Method: 516 primary tumor patients with …

Utilizing Markov Chains To Estimate Allele Progression Through Generations, Ronit Gandhi

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

All populations display patterns in allele frequencies over time. Some alleles cease to exist, while some grow to become the norm. These frequencies can shift or stay constant based on the conditions the population lives in. If in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the allele frequencies stay constant. Most populations, however, have bias from environmental factors, sexual preferences, other organisms, etc. We propose a stochastic Markov chain model to study allele progression across generations. In such a model, the allele frequencies in the next generation depend only on the frequencies in the current one.

We use this model to track a recessive allele …

Modeling The Bidirectional Relationship Between Shared-Patient Physician Networks And Patient Longitudinal Treatment Patterns: Application To Physician Risky-Prescribing, Xin Ran

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Risky-prescribing is a pressing public health concern in the United States. Opioids, benzodiazepines, and non-benzodiazepine sedative-hypnotics (sedative-hypnotics) are three commonly-prescribed but potentially risky drug groups, prescribed alone or in combination. Physician shared-patient networks provide a unique perspective in studying physician network characteristics and structures, as well as their association with the delivery of health care. Understanding how physician shared-patient networks are related to their prescribing may inform network-based interventions targeting risky-prescribing, which is yet to be fully studied.

We investigated patient receipt of risky prescriptions and physician risky-prescribing intensity through the scope of shared-patient networks. We used retrospective Medicare insurance …

Variability In Causal Effects On A Binary Outcome And Noncompliance In A Multisite Randomized Trial, Xinxin Sun

Theses and Dissertations

Noncompliance to treatment assignment is widespread in randomized trials and presents challenges in causal inference. In the presence of noncompliance, the most commonly estimated effect of treatment assignment, also known as intent-to-treat (ITT) effect, is biased. Of interest in this setting is the complier average causal effect (CACE), the ITT effect among compliers. Further complication arises when the outcome variable is partially observed.

My research focuses on estimating the distribution of a site-specific CACE in a multisite randomized controlled trial (MRCT) by maximum likelihood (ML). Assuming compliance missing at random (MAR). We express the likelihood as an integral with respect …

Reassessing Replication: Addressing The Replication Crisis From A Statistical Perspective, Alicia Richards Phd

Theses and Dissertations

In 2015, Open Science Framework directly replicated 100 psychology studies and found astonishingly low replication rates. Since, researchers have suggested factors that may have influenced the low rates, including the metrics used to assess replications. The definitions used to decide whether a replication study was successful all suffer from flaws. Therefore, we propose a new metric for assessing replication that can estimate the likelihood a study successfully replicated rather than forcing a binary choice and accounts for study design limitations.

Using equivalence study techniques, we first propose a new metric to assess replication, defining a successful replication as one where …

Model-Based Imputation Of Below Detection Limit Missing Data And Group Selection In Bayesian Group Index Regression, Matthew Carli

Theses and Dissertations

Investigations into the association between chemical exposure and health outcomes are increasingly focused on the role of chemical mixtures, as opposed to individual chemicals. The analysis of chemical mixture data required the development of novel statistical methods, one of these being Bayesian group index regression. A statistical challenge common to all chemical mixture analyses is the ubiquitous presence of below detection limit (BDL) data. We propose an extension of Bayesian group index regression that treats both regression effects and missing BDL observations as parameters in a model estimated through a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that we refer to as …

Integrative Post-Gwas Analyses Of Psychiatric Disorders: Identifying Putative Risk Genes And Gene Sets Using Transcriptome, Proteome And Methylome Information, Huseyin Gedik

Theses and Dissertations

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of psychiatric disorders (PD) yield numerous loci with significant signals, but often they do not implicate specific protein coding genes. Because GWAS risk loci are enriched in expression/protein/methylation quantitative loci (e/p/mQTL, hereafter xQTL), transcriptome/proteome/methylome-wide association studies (T/P/MWAS, hereafter XWAS), which integrate information from GWAS and x-level (mRNA, protein or DNA methylation levels) coming from largest xQTL studies, can link GWAS signals to effects on specific genes. For gene level analyses, researchers use mendelian randomization (MR) methods to fine-map the association between x-levels and trait. However, none of the previous studies ever jointly analyzed XWAS of multiple …

The Birds And The Trees: Quantifying The Drivers Of Whitebark Pine Decline And Clark's Nutcracker Habitat Use In Glacier National Park, Vladimir Kovalenko

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, is in steep decline in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA due to the non-native pathogen Cronartium ribicola, causal agent of the fatal disease white pine blister rust. A sample of the park’s population suggests that approximately 70 percent of whitebark pines have died, while 65 percent of the remaining trees are infected. Using landscape and climate variables, we show how geographic location, elevation, aspect, solar radiation, relative humidity, and snowpack interact with tree diameter to affect mortality, disease incidence, cone production, and regeneration. We also examine how …

Laboratory Practices And Antimicrobial Resistance In A Florida Hospital, Crispina Marie Sy-Trias

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Antibiotic resistance is a health threat affecting millions of Americans. Microorganisms develop resistance to antibiotics, rendering them useless for treating infections. The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the associations between sample processing time and antibiotic resistance and is based on the health belief model. A retrospective specimen tracking activity of data from November 2019 to November 2020 was obtained by random sampling of 246 bacterial cultures. One hundred ninety-six (80%) samples were processed on time, and 50 (20%) were delayed; 167 (68%) samples were determined to have the presence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and 79 (32%) with …

Transformations Between Rotational And Translational Invariants Formulated In Reciprocal Spaces, Philip R Baldwin

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Correlation functions play an important role in the theoretical underpinnings of many disparate areas of the physical sciences: in particular, scattering theory. More recently, they have become useful in the classification of objects in areas such as computer vision and our area of cryoEM. Our primary classification scheme in the cryoEM image processing system, EMAN2, is now based on third order invariants formulated in Fourier space. This allows a factor of 8 speed up in the two classification procedures inherent in our software pipeline, because it allows for classification without the need for computationally costly alignment procedures. In this work, …

Knowledge Discovery On The Integrative Analysis Of Electrical And Mechanical Dyssynchrony To Improve Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy, Zhuo He

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is a standard method of treating heart failure by coordinating the function of the left and right ventricles. However, up to 40% of CRT recipients do not experience clinical symptoms or cardiac function improvements. The main reasons for CRT non-response include: (1) suboptimal patient selection based on electrical dyssynchrony measured by electrocardiogram (ECG) in current guidelines; (2) mechanical dyssynchrony has been shown to be effective but has not been fully explored; and (3) inappropriate placement of the CRT left ventricular (LV) lead in a significant number of patients.

In terms of mechanical dyssynchrony, we utilize an …

Statistical Methods For Gene Selection And Genetic Association Studies, Xuewei Cao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation includes five Chapters. A brief description of each chapter is organized as follows.

In Chapter One, we propose a signed bipartite genotype and phenotype network (GPN) by linking phenotypes and genotypes based on the statistical associations. It provides a new insight to investigate the genetic architecture among multiple correlated phenotypes and explore where phenotypes might be related at a higher level of cellular and organismal organization. We show that multiple phenotypes association studies by considering the proposed network are improved by incorporating the genetic information into the phenotype clustering.

In Chapter Two, we first illustrate the proposed GPN …