Inova

Joint postdoc program develops from partnership between Statistics Department, Inova Health

Teresa Donnellan — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:42:25 +0000

Joint postdoc program develops from partnership between Statistics Department, Inova Health Teresa Donnellan Thu, 09/28/2023 - 14:42

In This Story

Jiayang Sun

A partnership between George Mason University’s Statistics Department and Inova Health Care Services has entered its fifth year and continues to grow. The partnership has motivated a new initiative: a postdoc program for Inova researchers interested in developing skills in statistics and data science, run jointly by George Mason’s statistics and global and community health departments. Mohamad Bahij Moumneh, MD, and Jason F. Goldberg, MD, are the program’s standing inaugural members.

“As a fresh Lebanese medical graduate interested in expanding his acquired skills in the field of research, especially cardiology, and academia, the joint program provided me with this golden opportunity,” said Moumneh. He added, “By maximizing the resources of each institute, enhancements in the overall picture and quality of research and healthcare education occur, and allow both institutions to keep, if not exceed, pace with novel technologies and healthcare advancements and institutions.”

The partnership between Mason Statistics and Inova Health was supported by a contract between the university and the healthcare system via a parent award from NIH to the iTHRIV partnership. It supported the experts in George Mason’s Statistics Collaboration Core (SCC) to work with colleagues from Inova Health Care Services on research projects involving statistics or data science. To initialize each new project, INOVA researchers visit statinova.gmu.edu.

“The Statistics Collaboration Core (SCC) is a collaboration platform that supports and facilitates statistical collaborations with internal and external investigators or seekers for evidenced-based research, or statistical, biostatistical, or data science support to decision-making,” explained Jiayang Sun of Mason’s statistics department. Sun is a Principal Investigator on the new grant establishing the postdoc program, alongside co-PI Carolyn Drews-Botsch, the chair of the department of global and community health in Mason’s School of Public Health.

“The partnership between Inova and Mason will help with our research efforts aimed at prolonging life after heart transplantation,” said Goldberg. He noted that, for his case, SCC has provided advanced analysis of mircoRNA clinical rejection scores and has used machine learning to evaluate risk modeling of adverse outcomes within the first year of heart transplantation.

“These collaborations will continue to produce meaningful cardiovascular research,” he said.

Of the five-year partnership between Mason Statistics and Inova Health, Sun noted the relationship has been fruitful, producing additional grants, publications in the health and medical sector, and new grant proposals. She added that it serves as a welcome opportunity for both tenure track and term faculty to perform original research and collaborate with colleagues dealing with real-world problems. Research projects from the partnership have covered such important topics as opioid use, sepsis, heart failure, and—before there were reliable tests—the spread of COVID-19 among children in northern Virginia.

Sun, Moumneh, and Goldberg are likewise optimistic about the new joint postdoc program.

“Researchers can collaborate on various projects that eventually might lead to medical breakthroughs. One could say that the joint program fosters an environment of innovation and growth. The joint program also allows the addressing of pressing healthcare dilemmas, an event that might encourage students to think of possible solutions and managements,” said Moumneh.

Topics

Statistics

Inova

Department of Statistics

College of Public Health

College of Engineering and Computing

School of Computing

Community Partners

Students

Mason Statistics Collaboration Core partners with Inova

Tama Moni — Wed, 11 May 2022 20:27:14 +0000

Mason Statistics Collaboration Core partners with Inova Tama Moni Wed, 05/11/2022 - 16:27

The George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing statistics department and its Statistics Collaboration Core is working with Inova Health Care Services as part of a partnership called “iTHRIV.” Inova is Northern Virginia’s leading nonprofit healthcare provider, with 20,000+ team members providing more than two million patient visits each year at five hospitals. This partnership is funded by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“The collaboration with Inova Health is one of the examples of Mason Statistics actively collaborating in and/or taking leadership positions on large projects aimed at impacting science and society,” says Jiayang Sun, chair of the Mason Department of Statistics. Ben Sieyon Lee, a faculty member in the department, adds, “By connecting experts from both Mason and Inova, we are able to explore exciting research opportunities at the intersection of statistics and health care research. Many would have been otherwise overlooked.”

The Collaboration Core works with external organizations to provide support in the areas of statistical expertise; grant, manuscript writing, and conference abstract writings; survey design; research in statistics and data science; and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Collaboration Core website guides outside groups through the project proposal process.

The Core allows Mason faculty to be engaged with research in new ways and helps new, tenure-track faculty get exposed to grant work and external collaborators. In addition, it allows the university to establish itself as a leader in data science. “Our graduate students also play an active role in these collaborations,” says Lee. “They gain valuable experience in applying their statistical knowledge to real-world challenges.”

Topics

Inova

Statistics Faculty

Healthcare

National Institutes of Health

Mason statistics researchers help plan and analyze a study on COVID-19 prevalence in children in Northern Virginia

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 19:00:11 +0000

Mason statistics researchers help plan and analyze a study on COVID-19 prevalence in children in Northern Virginia Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/24/2021 - 15:00

In This Story

Jiayang Sun

Brett Hunter

Scott Bruce

Inova Children’s Hospital, the Virginia Department of Health, and the College of Engineering and Computing joined forces last summer to conduct a COVID-19 antibody study to analyze the incidence of COVID-19 in Northern Virginia’s children.

The overall antibody positive rate in children was 8.5 percent.

Mason’s Department of Statistics experts collaborated in the design of the testing protocol. They also helped analyze the data to determine how many children have had COVID-19.

This was a public service project, says Jiayang Sun, chair of the Department of Statistics and the Bernard J. Dunn Eminent Scholar. “It is an excellent, comprehensive study that considered multiple factors to systematically assess the seroprevalence in the diverse population of the area’s children. I am pleased with the quality of data and that our statisticians were involved, early, starting in the design stage of a study versus those only after the data had been collected.”

Scott Bruce, an assistant professor of statistics, says, “The timely and valuable findings from this project are due to the outstanding partnership among the healthcare professionals, government agencies, and statistics researchers involved in this project. More efforts like this are needed to produce high-quality data and analysis that will continue to build our understanding of this disease and inform strategies for mitigating the risk of infection among children and between children and adults.”

“We considered multiple factors, including age, living conditions, types of antibody tests, the CDC’s recommendation on orthogonal testing, and the data collection sites, which are correlated with population characteristics,” says Brett Hunter, Mason’s principal investigator for this project and associate chair of the Department of Statistics.

The analysis of blood samples from more than 1,000 children, ages 0 to 19, found:

COVID-19 antibodies were found in 8.2 percent of white children, 5.2 percent of black children, 5.7 percent of Asian children, and 16.2 percent of children with multiple racial origins.
Children identified as Hispanic ethnicity had a 26.6 percent rate of antibody positivity.
The rate was 13.7 percent in young children (0-5 years), 7.5 percent in school-age (6-10 years), 5.1 percent in early adolescents (11-15 years), and 10.8 percent in older adolescents (16-19 years).
The majority (66 percent) of children who had antibodies had no history of symptoms of COVID-19 infection, which highlights the silent or asymptomatic infection in children, and the subsequent risk of transmission of infection to others.

When compared to an adult serology study in Virginia, which reported a COVID-19 antibody positivity rate of 4.4 percent, the pediatric positive rate is nearly double.

“The pediatric serology project unexpectedly found more children were seropositive than we had anticipated,” says Rebecca Levorson, division director for pediatric infectious diseases, Inova Children’s Hospital. “Most of these children did not have symptoms, which makes it difficult to know who may be infectious and who is not at a specific time.”

“Nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is children, and as they may represent a larger proportion of SARS-CoV-2 disease than we previously thought, we need to recognize that children will continue to be infected with and possibly asymptomatically spread this disease. As we continue to fight this pandemic, we need to consider ways to protect them and others by using the tools we have available to us, including masking, social distancing, and vaccination.”

The project is an example of new grants/projects that can be generated from a collaborative contract/award between the Department of Statistics and the Inova Health System. The contract is based on a parent UL1 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Transitional Sciences Award (CTSA) to develop new research to improve the health of individuals and the public.

Researchers in the statistics department also worked on several other COVID-related studies, Sun says. The researchers want to provide good data that can be used for the public good, as the theme of 2020 Joint Statistical Meetings advocated.

More information about this pediatric serology project can be found at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.28.21250466v1

Topics

Statistics

Department of Statistics

Inova

coronavirus; covid-19

CEC faculty research

Mason bioengineering grads invent device to improve brain and spinal surgery

Melanie Balog — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 09:00:32 +0000

Mason bioengineering grads invent device to improve brain and spinal surgery Melanie Balog Thu, 06/27/2019 - 05:00

The Spinamics with Volgenau School of Engineering Dean Ken Ball (far left) at the Undergraduate Research Celebration on April 16, where they were selected as keynote speakers. Team members (starting second from left) are Paige Epler, Andrew Ryan, Tyra Bookhart and Laura Carter. Photo provided.

Four recent George Mason University alumni have devised a mechanism that improves minimally invasive brain and spinal surgery, and they’re optimistic that it can eventually be a useful tool in the medical field.

The recent Volgenau School of Engineering graduates—bioengineering majors Paige Epler, Andrew Ryan, Tyra Bookhart and Laura Carter—created an automated tubular dilator for their senior capstone project that simplifies the surgical process for minimally invasive brain and spinal surgery, simultaneously reducing the steep learning curve for surgeons and minimizing the risk of complications. Still in its early stages, their computer-assisted surgical invention automatically dilates the incision site in a short amount of time, replacing numerous manual steps.

The team, which calls itself the Spinamics, was searching for a capstone project at the start of fall 2018 when they accepted a challenge from Inova neurosurgeon Mahesh Shenai to improve surgical precision for brain and spinal surgery.

Working from the bioengineering lab at the new Peterson Family Health Sciences Hall, they came up with the automated tubular dilator, a device that decreases the likelihood of human error, making surgery more accurate while reducing chances of complications. The current method of dilating incision sites is difficult and requires multiple steps. If not done correctly, the process could lead to sepsis, a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s own reaction to infection causes injuries to its own tissues and organs, Epler said.

“[With our device], not only could we decrease the element of human error and hopefully lessen the risk of complications,” she said, “but we could also make it a much easier procedure for surgeons to learn.”

The students used different types of gelatin to simulate neural tissues during their tests while under the supervision of faculty advisors, Shenai, who is also an affiliated professor of bioengineering; Feitian Zhang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Qi Wei, an associate professor of bioengineering. They hope to test their device on cadavers and eventually move into clinical trials.

“The students took up the challenge of an open engineering problem,” Wei said. “They went from knowing little about the project to coming up with a functional prototype.”

For their efforts, the student quartet was the awarded the 2019 Volgenau School of Engineering Research Award in April. While all four graduated with bachelor’s degrees in May, Epler and Ryan plan to continue working on it even as they begin graduate school this fall.

“I would be very happy if this would be refined in the future for actual medical usage,” Epler said. “I think there’s a lot of potential to really improve brain and spine surgery if we continue working this device.”

“I feel like we’re making a difference with it,” Ryan said. “If we can get it to a point where we can get it to clinical trials and start seeing positive results, that’d be pretty humbling.”