Impact of the Health Equity Learning Series in Seven Colorado Communities: 2013 - 2015

In 2013, The Colorado Trust began funding the Health Equity Learning Series (HELS). The purpose of HELS was to increase knowledge and awareness of the social determinants of health (SDOH) in Colorado. A series of speakers annually spoke in Denver, primarily to the local nonprofit community. At the same time, grants were awarded to nonprofit organizations in 65 communities around the state to host "viewing parties," giving others outside of Denver the opportunity to hear the speaker and have a discussion. Among the 65 organizations over the course of three years, seven were awarded grants all three years, thereby hosting community events for approximately 12 speakers. This report is based on qualitative interviews conducted with these seven grantees. The purpose of the interviews was to understand how these organizations and communities applied lessons from HELS speakers to their daily work, how HELS impacted their efforts and how they were able to implement informed action as a result.

State of Evaluation in Colorado's Nonprofit Sector

This report presents findings and recommendations from a research project to understand the state of evaluation in Colorado's nonprofit sector. Adopting a national survey conducted by the Innovation Network, a Washington DCbased nonprofit evaluation, research and consulting firm, in addition to a set of in-depth interviews, the following study examined:1. The role of evaluation in nonprofit organizations in Colorado;2. The challenges to implementing evaluation practices; and3. Recommendations to support or enhance evaluation practices

Is Colorado Ready to Talk About the Role of Racism in Health Equity?

Is Colorado ready to talk about the role of racism in health equity? This is one of the questions grantees raised and discussed at the end of the 2015 Health Equity Learning Series (HELS). To better understand the answer, and explore perceptions of racism and its role in preventing health equity in their communities, the 22 Colorado Trust grantees were interviewed by project evaluator Melanie Tran of the University of Colorado Denver

Metabolomics analysis revealed distinct cyclic changes of metabolites altered by chronic ethanol-plus-binge and Shp-deficiency

Background Chronic ethanol consumption causes alcoholic liver disease (ALD) and disruption of the circadian system facilitates the development of ALD. Small heterodimer partner (SHP) is a nuclear receptor and critical regulator of hepatic lipid metabolism. This study aims at depicting circadian metabolomes altered by chronic ethanol-plus-binge and Shp-deficiency using high throughput Metabolomics. Methods Wild-type (WT) C57Bl/6 and Shp-/- mice were fed the control diet (CD) or Lieber De-Carli ethanol liquid diet (ED) for 10 days followed by a single bout of maltose (CD+M) or ethanol (ED+E) binge on the 11th day. Serum and liver were collected over a 24 hr light-dark (LD) cycle at Zeitgeber time ZT12, ZT18, ZT0 and ZT6 and metabolomics was performed using GC-MS. Results A total of 110 metabolites were identified in liver and of those 80 were also present in serum from pathways of carbohydrates, lipids, pentose phosphate, amino acids, nucleotides and tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle. In the liver, 91% of metabolites displayed rhythmicity with ED+E whereas in the serum, only 87% were rhythmic. Bioinformatics analysis identified unique metabolome patterns altered in WT CD+M, WT ED+E, Shp-/- CD+M, and Shp-/- ED+E groups. Specifically, metabolites from the nucleotide and amino acid pathway (ribose, glucose-6-phosphate, glutamic acid, aspartic acid and seduheptulose-7-P) were elevated in Shp-/- CD+M mice during the dark cycle, whereas metabolites including N-methylalanine, 2-hydroxybutyric acid, 2-hydroxyglutarate were elevated in WT ED+E mice during the light cycle. The rhythmicity and abundance of other individual metabolites were also significantly altered by both control and ethanol diets. Conclusions Metabolomics provides a useful means to identify unique metabolites altered by chronic ethanol-plus-binge

Changes in lipid composition during sexual development of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum

Abstract Background The development of differentiated sexual stages (gametocytes) within human red blood cells is essential for the propagation of the malaria parasite, since only mature gametocytes will survive in the mosquito’s midgut. Hence gametocytogenesis is a pre-requisite for transmission of the disease. Physiological changes involved in sexual differentiation are still enigmatic. In particular the lipid metabolism—despite being central to cellular regulation and development—is not well explored. Methods Here the lipid profiles of red blood cells infected with the five different sexual stages of Plasmodium falciparum were analysed by mass spectrometry and compared to those from uninfected and asexual trophozoite infected erythrocytes. Results Fundamental differences between erythrocytes infected with the different parasite stages were revealed. In mature gametocytes many lipids that decrease in the trophozoite and early gametocyte infected red blood cells are regained. In particular, regulators of membrane fluidity, cholesterol and sphingomyelin, increased significantly during gametocyte maturation. Neutral lipids (serving mainly as caloriometric reserves) increased from 3 % of total lipids in uninfected to 27 % in stage V gametocyte infected red blood cells. The major membrane lipid class (phospholipids) decreased during gametocyte development. Conclusions The lipid profiles of infected erythrocytes are characteristic for the particular parasite life cycle and maturity stages of gametocytes. The obtained lipid profiles are crucial in revealing the lipid metabolism of malaria parasites and identifying targets to interfere with this deadly disease.We are grateful to the Australian Red Cross for providing human RBCs and serum. Support of the Australian Research Council is acknowledged. TWM is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (FT110100249)

The Design and Operation of The Keck Observatory Archive

The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) operate an archive for the Keck Observatory. At the end of 2013, KOA completed the ingestion of data from all eight active observatory instruments. KOA will continue to ingest all newly obtained observations, at an anticipated volume of 4 TB per year. The data are transmitted electronically from WMKO to IPAC for storage and curation. Access to data is governed by a data use policy, and approximately two-thirds of the data in the archive are public.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figs, 4 tables. Presented at Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014. June 2014, Montreal, Canad

Differences in Left and Right Laparoscopic Adrenalectomy

Although no difference was found in complications or conversion rates for either right or left laparoscopic adrenalectomy, the authors report that lower blood loss and decreased operative time were noted with laparoscopic right adrenalectomy

B-Cos Aligned Transformers Learn Human-Interpretable Features

Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Swin Transformers (Swin) are currently state-of-the-art in computational pathology. However, domain experts are still reluctant to use these models due to their lack of interpretability. This is not surprising, as critical decisions need to be transparent and understandable. The most common approach to understanding transformers is to visualize their attention. However, attention maps of ViTs are often fragmented, leading to unsatisfactory explanations. Here, we introduce a novel architecture called the B-cos Vision Transformer (BvT) that is designed to be more interpretable. It replaces all linear transformations with the B-cos transform to promote weight-input alignment. In a blinded study, medical experts clearly ranked BvTs above ViTs, suggesting that our network is better at capturing biomedically relevant structures. This is also true for the B-cos Swin Transformer (Bwin). Compared to the Swin Transformer, it even improves the F1-score by up to 4.7% on two public datasets.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2023 (oral). Camera-ready available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43993-3_5

Mortality Attributable to Low Levels of Education in the United States

BackgroundEducational disparities in U.S. adult mortality are large and have widened across birth cohorts. We consider three policy relevant scenarios and estimate the mortality attributable to: (1) individuals having less than a high school degree rather than a high school degree, (2) individuals having some college rather than a baccalaureate degree, and (3) individuals having anything less than a baccalaureate degree rather than a baccalaureate degree, using educational disparities specific to the 1925, 1935, and 1945 cohorts.MethodsWe use the National Health Interview Survey data (1986–2004) linked to prospective mortality through 2006 (N=1,008,949), and discrete-time survival models, to estimate education- and cohort-specific mortality rates. We use those mortality rates and data on the 2010 U.S. population from the American Community Survey, to calculate annual attributable mortality estimates.ResultsIf adults aged 25–85 in the 2010 U.S. population experienced the educational disparities in mortality observed in the 1945 cohort, 145,243 deaths could be attributed to individuals having less than a high school degree rather than a high school degree, 110,068 deaths could be attributed to individuals having some college rather than a baccalaureate degree, and 554,525 deaths could be attributed to individuals having anything less than a baccalaureate degree rather than a baccalaureate degree. Widening educational disparities between the 1925 and 1945 cohorts result in a doubling of attributable mortality. Mortality attributable to having less than a high school degree is proportionally similar among women and men and among non-Hispanic blacks and whites, and is greater for cardiovascular disease than for cancer.ConclusionsMortality attributable to low education is comparable in magnitude to mortality attributable to individuals being current rather than former smokers. Existing research suggests that a substantial part of the association between education and mortality is causal. Thus, policies that increase education could significantly reduce adult mortality

A case study in adaptable and reusable infrastructure at the Keck Observatory Archive: VO interfaces, moving targets, and more

The Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) (https://koa.ipac.caltech.edu) curates all observations acquired at the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) since it began operations in 1994, including data from eight active instruments and two decommissioned instruments. The archive is a collaboration between WMKO and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI). Since its inception in 2004, the science information system used at KOA has adopted an architectural approach that emphasizes software re-use and adaptability. This paper describes how KOA is currently leveraging and extending open source software components to develop new services and to support delivery of a complete set of instrument metadata, which will enable more sophisticated and extensive queries than currently possible. In August 2015, KOA deployed a program interface to discover public data from all instruments equipped with an imaging mode. The interface complies with version 2 of the Simple Imaging Access Protocol (SIAP), under development by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), which defines a standard mechanism for discovering images through spatial queries. The heart of the KOA service is an R-tree-based, database-indexing mechanism prototyped by the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) and further developed by the Montage Image Mosaic project, designed to provide fast access to large imaging data sets as a first step in creating wide-area image mosaics (such as mosaics of subsets of the 4.7 million images of the SDSS DR9 release). The KOA service uses the results of the spatial R-tree search to create an SQLite data database for further relational filtering. The service uses a JSON configuration file to describe the association between instrument parameters and the service query parameters, and to make it applicable beyond the Keck instruments. The images generated at the Keck telescope usually do not encode the image footprints as WCS fields in the FITS file headers. Because SIAP searches are spatial, much of the effort in developing the program interface involved processing the instrument and telescope parameters to understand how accurately we can derive the WCS information for each instrument. This knowledge is now being fed back into the KOA databases as part of a program to include complete metadata information for all imaging observations. The R-tree program was itself extended to support temporal (in addition to spatial) indexing, in response to requests from the planetary science community for a search engine to discover observations of Solar System objects. With this 3D-indexing scheme, the service performs very fast time and spatial matches between the target ephemerides, obtained from the JPL SPICE service. Our experiments indicate these matches can be more than 100 times faster than when separating temporal and spatial searches. Images of the tracks of the moving targets, overlaid with the image footprints, are computed with a new command-line visualization tool, mViewer, released with the Montage distribution. The service is currently in test and will be released in late summer 2016