2019 Health MIRG Program Awardees Announcement

The Division of Research is pleased to announce the three winners of our 2019 Health Multidisciplinary Internal Research Grant (Health MIRG) program:

  1. Project Title: Ensuring an Accessible Trauma System in Texas
    • Research Team:
      • Eduardo Pérez, Ingram School of Engineering (PI)
      • Francis A. Méndez Mediavilla, Computer Information Systems & Quantitative Methods (Co-I)
    • Abstract
      Trauma care centers are hospitals that provide specialized medical and nursing care to patients with traumatic injuries. The latter can range from injuries obtained in personal environments to natural disasters also including, but not limited to, motor accidents and injuries sustained in work environments. Trauma centers do not replace existing hospitals and emergency departments, but complement existing medical services by providing services to treat serious injuries. The goal of this research is to derive a scalable methodology to plan and improve the trauma system configuration in Texas, considering uncertainty. Texas is home to 280 state-designated trauma centers. However, trauma continues to extract a high human cost on Texans. Accidents were the fifth leading cause of death in Texas in 2015, and motor vehicle accidents were the leading cause of death for the 5 to 34-year-old age group. Rural healthcare is especially problematic due to the number, demographics, and health of residents; shortage of doctors; and travel distances. Despite random variation being the main characteristic of trauma care centers, current research has not considered uncertainty when addressing this problem. In addition, dynamic models have not been applied to problems of trauma center location. Therefore, this research proposes extending existing models to consider more realistic assumptions, such as uncertainty of demand, multi-type demand, and facilities multi-level settings. This work is timely as the U.S. seeks to expand access to healthcare services. Computational experiments will evaluate efficacy and undertake case study, based on information provided by healthcare collaborators and focused on rural healthcare as a testbed.
  2. Project Title: Get the Big Pictures: Flood Analytics Using Big Multimedia Data
    • Research Team:
      • Edwin Chow, Geography (PI)
      • Yan Yan, Computer Science (Co-I)
    • Abstract

      About 95 percent of geotagged tweets and crowdsourced data relevant to Hurricane Harvey were multimedia (i.e., images or videos), but the contextual and objective flood analytics (e.g., water depth, cover- age, flood damage, etc.) embedded in the multimedia remains an untapped resource [Alyaqout, 2018]. The primary objective of this research is to develop an innovative framework to extract flood analytics from multiple sources of big data for smart emergency management. This research proposes to harvest flood observations from multisource data, including but not limited to social media, crowd-sourced data, and surveillance cameras during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Then we will develop novel algorithms in Computer Vision and Geographic Information Science to extract water depth from heterogeneous data of text, multimedia and geospatial inputs. These discrete flood observations will be validated against authoritative field data and integrated into a space-time database. The flood database and novel algorithms derived from this MIRG study will fuel the application of two future external grants. The first one is to extend the proposed framework on a mobile-cloud platform to extract flood analytics of a contemporary flood event in near real-time and further examine its accuracy and performance. The second proposal will develop a mobile/web application to provide a Flood Advisory SysTem (FAST) with personalized alerts based on geo-fencing and flood-aware routing for emergency management and examine the best practices and theories of emergency management.

  3. Project Title: Microbiomes in Critically Endangered Chimpanzees: Seasonal Influences Related to a Savanna Mosaic Environment
    • Research Team:
      • Jill D. Pruetz, Anthropology (PI)  
      • Camila Carlos-Shanley, Biology (Co-I)
    • Abstract

      Most animals, including humans, harbor a diverse community of micro-organisms in their gut known as the microbiome. Evidence suggests that the microbiome is involved in nutrient acquisition, metabolism, immune function, brain function, and behavior.  Chimpanzees are often used as models for understanding human behavior and biology, as they are our closest living relative. Anthropologists, in particular, look to these apes as a means of better understanding our evolutionary history. Chimpanzees at the Fongoli study site in Senegal, West Africa, are the only habituated study group of apes in a savanna mosaic, similar to the environment in which anthropologists believe the earliest members of our own lineage evolved. Fongoli chimpanzees (FC), therefore, provide a good model for understanding human and hominin evolution based on their relatedness (homology) and habitat type (analogy). Given the unique environment in which the FC live compared to almost all other apes habituated to human study, a series of questions can be addressed focusing on ecological effects of this hot and dry environment on ape microbiomes. In this project, we will investigate the impact of seasonal and dietary changes on the Fongoli Chimpanzee gut microbiome. We expect that there will be microbiome differences according to season based on the significant differences in rainfall and water availability between wet and dry seasons in Senegal, as well as FC use of medicinal plants in the wet season especially. In this opportunity, we will leverage a baseline dataset for monitoring the health status of FC facing urbanization disturbances.

Please direct Health MIRG questions to research@txstate.edu.