A Study on Agreement in PICO Span Annotations

In evidence-based medicine, relevance of medical literature is determined by predefined relevance conditions. The conditions are defined based on PICO elements, namely, Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome. Hence, PICO annotations in medical literature are essential for automatic relevant document filtering. However, defining boundaries of text spans for PICO elements is not straightforward. In this paper, we study the agreement of PICO annotations made by multiple human annotators, including both experts and non-experts. Agreements are estimated by a standard span agreement (i.e., matching both labels and boundaries of text spans), and two types of relaxed span agreement (i.e., matching labels without guaranteeing matching boundaries of spans). Based on the analysis, we report two observations: (i) Boundaries of PICO span annotations by individual human annotators are very diverse. (ii) Despite the disagreement in span boundaries, general areas of the span annotations are broadly agreed by annotators. Our results suggest that applying a standard agreement alone may undermine the agreement of PICO spans, and adopting both a standard and a relaxed agreements is more suitable for PICO span evaluation.Comment: Accepted in SIGIR 2019 (Short paper

Effect of an infant stimulation program on children

A planned stimulation program for infants with developmental problems utilizing individual program plans has greater beneficial effects than does traditional periodic follow-up care alone

Mental Health First Aid Training for VCU Faculty and Staff

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA), an international training program, teaches participants to notice and support individuals experiencing a mental health or substance use issue and connects them to appropriate resources. While resources exist for students, this project aims to implement MHFA as a professional development opportunity for VCU faculty and staff. A successful pilot training held this summer demonstrates the need and desire for training in the VCU community. Evidence shows mental health issues lead to absenteeism, employee turnover and increased healthcare costs, costing organizations billions in recruitment that may have been avoided. Through state partnerships, trainers are available to offer this one-day program multiple times a year

Project C.O.R.E.: Coaching Opportunities with Real Experiences

Retention and graduation rates of VCU men of color (MOC) is significantly lower than white men and women of color. Due to demonstrated significant attrition occurring after the sophomore year, Project C.O.R.E. (Coaching Opportunities with Real Experiences) is proposed as a sophomore-focused program that builds upon an existing freshman course on professional development for MOC. While the first-year course introduces students to a VCU support network, Project C.O.R.E. aims to increase university retention by expanding the student support network to members of the local community. Students are paired with community coaches, predominantly VCU alumni, to enhance their career and life-skills development. This program provides continued community, guidance, and support to encourage MOC to continue on the path to graduation

Structural insights into the role of the Smoothened cysteine-rich domain in Hedgehog signalling.

Smoothened (Smo) is a member of the Frizzled (FzD) class of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and functions as the key transducer in the Hedgehog (Hh) signalling pathway. Smo has an extracellular cysteine-rich domain (CRD), indispensable for its function and downstream Hh signalling. Despite its essential role, the functional contribution of the CRD to Smo signalling has not been clearly elucidated. However, given that the FzD CRD binds to the endogenous Wnt ligand, it has been proposed that the Smo CRD may bind its own endogenous ligand. Here we present the NMR solution structure of the Drosophila Smo CRD, and describe interactions between the glucocorticoid budesonide (Bud) and the Smo CRDs from both Drosophila and human. Our results highlight a function of the Smo CRD, demonstrating its role in binding to small-molecule modulators

Observing copepods through a genomic lens

Background: Copepods outnumber every other multicellular animal group. They are critical components of the world's freshwater and marine ecosystems, sensitive indicators of local and global climate change, key ecosystem service providers, parasites and predators of economically important aquatic animals and potential vectors of waterborne disease. Copepods sustain the world fisheries that nourish and support human populations. Although genomic tools have transformed many areas of biological and biomedical research, their power to elucidate aspects of the biology, behavior and ecology of copepods has only recently begun to be exploited. Discussion: The extraordinary biological and ecological diversity of the subclass Copepoda provides both unique advantages for addressing key problems in aquatic systems and formidable challenges for developing a focused genomics strategy. This article provides an overview of genomic studies of copepods and discusses strategies for using genomics tools to address key questions at levels extending from individuals to ecosystems. Genomics can, for instance, help to decipher patterns of genome evolution such as those that occur during transitions from free living to symbiotic and parasitic lifestyles and can assist in the identification of genetic mechanisms and accompanying physiological changes associated with adaptation to new or physiologically challenging environments. The adaptive significance of the diversity in genome size and unique mechanisms of genome reorganization during development could similarly be explored. Genome-wide and EST studies of parasitic copepods of salmon and large EST studies of selected free-living copepods have demonstrated the potential utility of modern genomics approaches for the study of copepods and have generated resources such as EST libraries, shotgun genome sequences, BAC libraries, genome maps and inbred lines that will be invaluable in assisting further efforts to provide genomics tools for copepods. Summary: Genomics research on copepods is needed to extend our exploration and characterization of their fundamental biological traits, so that we can better understand how copepods function and interact in diverse environments. Availability of large scale genomics resources will also open doors to a wide range of systems biology type studies that view the organism as the fundamental system in which to address key questions in ecology and evolution