Public Health

Development of a Machine Learning Algorithm for the Surveillance of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network conducts population-based surveillance of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among 8-year old children in multiple US sites. To classify ASD, trained clinicians review developmental evaluations collected from multiple health and education sources to determine whether the child meets the ASD surveillance case criteria. The number of ev...

Development of a Zika Virus Infection Model in Cynomolgus Macaques.

Limited availability of Indian rhesus macaques (IRM) is a bottleneck to study Zika virus (ZIKV) pathogenesis and evaluation of appropriate control measures in non-human primates. To address these issues, we report here the Mauritian cynomolgus macaque (MCM) model for ZIKV infection. In brief, six MCMs (seronegative for Dengue and ZIKV) were subdivided into three cohorts with a male and female each...

Susceptibility Profiles of Isolates to Streptomycin and Rifampicin in Two Districts of the Eastern Region of Ghana.

. Drug resistance is a major challenge in antibiotic chemotherapy. Assessing resistance profiles of pathogens constitutes an essential surveillance to...

Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Causal Inference in Observational Studies.

Estimation of causal effects using observational data continues to grow in popularity in the epidemiologic literature. While many applications of caus...

Social Media as a Sentinel for Disease Surveillance: What Does Sociodemographic Status Have to Do with It?

INTRODUCTION: Data from social media have been shown to have utility in augmenting traditional approaches to public health surveillance. Quantifying t...

Tackling Missing Data in Community Health Studies Using Additive LS-SVM Classifier.

Missing data is a common issue in community health and epidemiological studies. Direct removal of samples with missing data can lead to reduced sample...

Development of chronic hepatitis B infection in a hepatitis B vaccine responder.

The Hepatitis B vaccine is highly effective for the prevention of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. We report the development of chronic HBV infection (Gen...

Marginal zone lymphoma: Associated autoimmunity and auto-immune disorders.

Large epidemiological studies have shown a consistent increased risk for developing lymphoma in the setting of autoimmune disorders (AID). It is known...

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Study for the Detection and Quantitation of Cholesterol in HSV529 Therapeutic Vaccine Candidate.

This study describes the NMR-based method to determine the limit of quantitation (LOQ) and limit of detection (LOD) of cholesterol, a process-related ...

Detection of clinically important colorectal surgical site infection using Bayesian network.

BACKGROUND: Despite extensive efforts to monitor and prevent surgical site infections (SSIs), real-time surveillance of clinical practice has been spa...

Support vector machine applied to predict the zoonotic potential of E. coli O157 cattle isolates.

Sequence analyses of pathogen genomes facilitate the tracking of disease outbreaks and allow relationships between strains to be reconstructed and vir...

DRPPP: A machine learning based tool for prediction of disease resistance proteins in plants.

Plant disease outbreak is increasing rapidly around the globe and is a major cause for crop loss worldwide. Plants, in turn, have developed diverse de...

Impact of three task demand factors on simulated unmanned system intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations.

The present study investigated how three task demand factors influenced performance, subjective workload and stress of novice intelligence, surveillan...

The Apollo Structured Vocabulary: an OWL2 ontology of phenomena in infectious disease epidemiology and population biology for use in epidemic simulation.

BACKGROUND: We developed the Apollo Structured Vocabulary (Apollo-SV)-an OWL2 ontology of phenomena in infectious disease epidemiology and population ...

Exploring trends of nonmedical use of prescription drugs and polydrug abuse in the Twittersphere using unsupervised machine learning.

INTRODUCTION: Nonmedical use of prescription medications/drugs (NMUPD) is a serious public health threat, particularly in relation to the prescription...

Detecting hospital-acquired infections: A document classification approach using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting.

Hospital-acquired infections pose a significant risk to patient health, while their surveillance is an additional workload for hospital staff. Our ove...

Applying GIS and Machine Learning Methods to Twitter Data for Multiscale Surveillance of Influenza.

Traditional methods for monitoring influenza are haphazard and lack fine-grained details regarding the spatial and temporal dynamics of outbreaks. Twi...

Effects of Fish Oil Supplementation on Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM): A Systematic Review.

CONTEXT: One of the most common complications of pregnancy is gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), which is increasing worldwide. Experimental and epi...

A new algorithmic approach for the extraction of temporal associations from clinical narratives with an application to medical product safety surveillance reports.

The sheer volume of textual information that needs to be reviewed and analyzed in many clinical settings requires the automated retrieval of key clini...

THE EVALUATION OF DOMESTIC DUCKS AS POTENTIAL RESERVOIR OF AVIAN INFLUENZA VIRUS IN POST HPAI H5N1 OUTBREAK AREA, SUNYANI MUNICIPALITY, BRONG AHAFO REGION OF GHANA.

BACKGROUND: Avian influenza (AI) is an important zoonotic disease responsible for significant losses in most sub-Saharan countries. However, the role ...