PHIND Seminar Series: Topics Below
Ahmed Metwally, PhD
“Pre-symptomatic detection of COVID-19 via wearables biosensors”
Postdoctoral Scholar – Michael Snyder, PhD Lab
Department of Genetics
Stanford University
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, MS
“Continuous remote cardiorespiratory and health monitoring using the Hexoskin biometric shirt”
Co-founder and CEO
Hexoskin
Location: Zoom Webinar
Webinar URL: https://stanford.zoom.us/s/98925964231
Dial: +1 650 724 9799 or +1 833 302 1536 (Toll Free)
Webinar ID: 989 2596 4231
Passcode: 298382
11:00am – 12:00pm Seminar & Discussion
RSVP: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bruT-pvvQUePuBLqm2SLkQ
Ahmed Metwally Abstract
Wearable devices digitally measuring vital signs have been used for monitoring health and illness onset and have a high potential for real-time monitoring and disease detection. As such, they are potentially useful during public health crises, such as the current COVID-19 global pandemic. In my talk, I’ll discuss how wearables biosensors can be used as a tool to early detect COVID19 onset using physiological and activity data. By using retrospective smartwatch data, we showed that 63% of the COVID-19 cases could be detected before symptom onset in real-time via the occurrence of extreme elevations in resting heart rate relative to the individual baseline. Our findings suggest that consumer wearables may be used for the large-scale real-time detection of respiratory infections, often pre-symptomatically, and provide an approach for managing epidemics using digital tracking and health monitoring.
About Ahmed Metwally
Ahmed Metwally is a postdoctoral scholar in the Snyder lab at Stanford University. Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics/Bioengineering and MS in Computer Science (focused on Deep Learning), both from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2018. He currently works on developing novel machine learning methods for longitudinal multimodal biomedical data fusion (omics and wearable biosensors data) to early detect cardiometabolic diseases and personalize their treatments. Ahmed has received numerous awards, such as NIH Predoctoral Translational Scientist fellowship, ISMB’20 best talk award, Stanford COVID-19 RISE Grant, second-place award at Stanford Health++ Hackathon, and many travel awards NSF, IEEE, ISCB, and UIUC for various educational and scholarly activities.
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier Abstract
The Hexoskin Connected Health platform will be discussed as an example of a biometric shirt validated for use in telehealth and clinical research. Hexoskin has the only clinically validated biometric garment which provides continuous monitoring of numerous and unique physiological parameters. Hexoskin is an enabling technology for telehealth use cases, such as remote patient monitoring, rehab, and detect the onset of illness. Hexoskin offers a unique set of high-resolution biometric data that can continuously monitor activity, sleep, cardiac and respiratory data. Projects in fields such as cardiology, respiratory, behavioral and physiological psychology, biofeedback research, sleep research, and health will be described. The Hexoskin Connected Health Platform provides researchers with accessible solutions such as the Hexoskin Dashboards, Open API, and Apps to manage, visualize, annotate, analyze, and export raw & processed health data. Data extraction tools allow access to the raw data with time series for machine learning and artificial intelligence projects.
About Pierre-Alexandre Fournier
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier is co-founder and CEO of Hexoskin, a Montreal-based company focused on clinical-grade wearable sensors and AI software for health and clinical research. Hexoskin was founded in 2006 and in 2013 released the first iPhone compatible smart clothing for health monitoring, winning several international awards. In 2018 Hexoskin launched a remote health monitoring system for astronauts on the International Space Station. Hexoskin recently reached the milestone of 100 scientific publications. Pierre-Alexandre earned his MASc and his BEng in Electrical Engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and became a lecturer there teaching machine learning. He completed the Harvard Business School HBX Core program with high honors. Pierre-Alexandre is also an advocate for transparency in healthcare, patient empowerment, and healthcare innovation through design.
Hosted by: Angela McIntyre, Executive Director, eWEAR Initiative
Sponsored by: PHIND Center, Department of Radiology, eWEAR Initiative
Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting
• Curt Langlotz, MD, PhD: Overview of the AIMI Center
• Brian Hargreaves, PhD: Research Details from Town Hall, Q&A, and COVID19 Updates
Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.
Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology
PHIND Seminar Series: Maternal Trauma History, Attachment Style, and Depression Are Associated with Broad DNA Methylation Signatures in Infants
Thalia Robakis, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Location: Zoom
Webinar URL: https://stanford.zoom.us/s/95483174518
Dial: US: +1 650 724 9799 or +1 833 302 1536 (Toll Free)
Webinar ID: 954 8317 4518
Passcode: 179384
11:00am – 12:00pm Seminar & Discussion
RSVP Here
ABSTRACT
Background: The early environment provides many cues to young organisms that guide their development as they mature. Maternal personality and behavior are an important aspect of the environment of the developing human infant. The molecular mechanisms by which these influences are exerted are not well understood. We attempted to identify whether maternal traits could be associated with alterations in DNA methylation patterns in infants.
Methods: 32 women oversampled for history of depression were recruited in pregnancy and provided information on depressive symptoms, attachment style, and history of early life adversity. Buccal cell DNA was obtained from their infants at six months of age for a large-scale analysis of methylation patterns across 5×106 individual CpG dinucleotides, using clustering-based criteria for significance to control for multiple comparisons. Separately, associations between maternal depression, attachment style, and history of adversity and psychobehavioral outcomes in preschool-age children were examined.
Results: Tens of thousands of individual infant CpGs were alternatively methylated in association with each of the three studied maternal traits. Genes implicated in cell-cell communication, developmental patterning, growth, immune function/inflammatory response, and neurotransmission were identified. The result sets were highly coextensive among the three maternal traits, but areas of divergence exhibited intriguing parallels with behavioral outcomes.
Conclusions: Maternal personality traits are an important aspect of the infant environment that shapes offspring development in many ways. Infant genes that are epigenetically modified in reponse to maternal traits are potential candidate mediators for these effects. We have identified a large number of such genes and demonstrated parallels to clinically measurable outcomes in children.
ABOUT
Dr. Robakis is a psychiatrist with clinical and research interests in perinatal mood disorders and in the contribution of early life experiences to adult mental health and illness. She completed her M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology at Columbia University’s Medical Scientist Training Program, residency training in psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a research fellowship in perinatal mood disorders also at Stanford. She remained on the clinical faculty at Stanford until 2019, when she accepted a position at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is currently Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Assistant Director of the Women’s Mental Health Program.
Dr. Robakis’ research interests include the effects of early life stress and disordered attachment on risk for psychiatric illness in the perinatal period, on alterations in metabolism and cognition, and on psychobehavioral development in offspring. She is particularly interested in using epigenetic marks to help identify the biological pathways through which early life experiences exert their effects on outcomes in adulthood and intergenerationally.
Hosted by: Garry Gold, M.D.
Sponsored by the PHIND Center and the Department of Radiology
Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting
Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.
February 19 Speakers:
Bruce Daniel, MD – Center Overview: IMMERS
Jennifer McNab, PhD – Encoding and Decoding Diffusion MRI
Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology
Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting
• Dominik Fleischmann, MD: 3DQ Lab Overview
• Tom Soh, PhD: Research Updates
Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.
Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology
Join us for the annual Precision Health & Integrated Diagnostics Symposium. This all-day virtual event will showcase the exciting PHIND work that is going on campus wide. The featured presentations will be from current PHIND investigators and Precision Health experts. We hope you can join us and look forward to building the PHIND community together.
The agenda and speaker information are available on the PHIND website. The event is fully virtual and the livestream link will be posted on the PHIND website closer to the event.
Date: April 10, 2021 (8 AM-6PM)
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- 8 AM-8:20 AM opening remarks Zainub and Pete
- 8:20 AM-9:20 AM Talk 1 “I fought the law and no one won”
- 10 minute Break
- 9:30 AM-10:30 AM talk 2 students and doctors with disabilities panel
- 20 minute break
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- 10:50 AM-11:50 AM Breakout
- One hour lunch (TBD)
- 12:50 PM-1:50 PM Talk 3 the frontiers of disability research
- Lisa Meeks is moderating
- Bonnie Swenor invited
- 10 minute break
- 2:00 PM-3:00 PM breakout 2
- 10 minute break
- 3:10 PM-4:10 PM talk 4 do-it-yourself disability advocacy (Poullos/Tolchin with students)
- 4:10 PM-4:30 PM closing remarks
- 4:30 PM-6 PM virtual happy hour
Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting
• Research Announcements
• Michelle James, PhD – Detecting and Tracking Immune Responses in the Brain and Beyond using PET
• Ryan Spitler, PhD – Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics (PHIND) Center
Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.
Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology
PHIND Seminar Series: Impact of the Veterans Affairs National Abdominal Aortic Screening Program
Manuel Garcia-Toca, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Surgery
Chief, Division of Vascular Surgery
Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC)
Oliver O. Aalami, M.D.
Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery, Vascular Surgery
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
Location: Zoom
Webinar URL: https://stanford.zoom.us/s/98417624095
Dial: US: +1 650 724 9799 or +1 833 302 1536 (Toll Free)
Webinar ID: 984 1762 4095
Passcode: 111283
11:00am – 12:00pm Seminar & Discussion
RSVP Here
ABSTRACT
Background: The U.S. Federal Government enacted the Screen for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms Very Efficiently Act in January 2007. Simultaneously, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) implemented a more inclusive AAA screening policy for veteran beneficiaries shortly afterwards.
Our study aimed to evaluate the impact of the VA program on AAA detection rate and all-cause mortality compared to a cohort of patients whose aneurysms were identified by other abdominal imaging.
Methods: We identified veterans with an AAA screening study using the two existing Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes (G0389 and 76706). In the comparison group, eligible abdominal imaging studies included ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) queried according to CPT codes between 2001 and 2018.
We used a difference-in-differences regression model to evaluate the change in aneurysm detection rate and all-cause mortality five years before and eleven years after the VA implemented the screening policy in 2007.
We calculated survival estimates after AAA screening or non-screening imaging of patients with or without AAA diagnosis and used multivariate Cox regression model to evaluate mortality in patients with a positive AAA diagnosis adjusting for patient characteristics and comorbidities.
Results: We identified 3.9 million veterans with abdominal imaging, a total of 303,664 of whom were coded has having an AAA US screening between 2007 and 2018. An AAA diagnosis was made in 4.84% of the screening group vs. 1.3% in the non-screening imaging group P<0.001, yet more aneurysms were found with general imaging studies (50,730 vs.15,449) (Fig 1).
On Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, patients with an AAA diagnosis had higher overall mortality than patients who screened normal; patients with aneurysms found with non-screening imaging had the highest mortality, log-rank P<0.001 (Fig 2).
The difference in differences regression analysis, showed that the absolute AAA detection rate was 1.55% higher (95% CI 1.2- 1.8), and the mortality was 13.89 % lower (95% CI 10.18 %-16.66 %) after the introduction of the screening program in 2007.
Multivariate Cox regression analysis in patients with AAA diagnosis (65-74-year-old) demonstrated a significantly lower 5-year mortality [HR 0.45 (95% CI 0.43-0.48)] for patients in the US Screening group P<0.001.
Conclusions: In a nationwide analysis of VA patients, implementation of AAA screening was associated with improved survival and a higher rate of AAA diagnosis. These findings provide further support for this program’s continuation versus defaulting to incidental recognition following other abdominal imaging.
ABOUT MANUEL GARCIA-TOCA
Dr. Garcia-Toca earned his medical degree at the Universidad Anahuac in Mexico 1999. He has a master’s degree in Health Policy from Stanford University.
He received his general surgery training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University in 2008. He then completed a Vascular Surgery fellowship at Northwestern University in 2010. Dr. Garcia-Toca is board certified in both surgery and vascular surgery.
Dr. Garcia-Toca joined Stanford Vascular Surgery in 2015. He is currently Clinical Professor of Surgery in the Division of Vascular Surgery. Dr. Garcia-Toca had previously served as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Brown University. Dr. Garcia Toca is a Staff Surgeon at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose.
His research interests include new therapeutic strategies and outcomes for the management of vascular trauma, cerebrovascular diseases, dialysis access, aortic dissection and aneurysms.
ABOUT OLIVER O. AALAMI
Dr. Aalami is a Clinical Associate Professor of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery at Stanford University and the Palo Alto VA and serves as the Lead Director of Stanford’s Biodesign for Digital Health. He is the course director for Biodesign for Digital Health, Building for Digital Health and co-founder of the open source project, CardinalKit, developed to support sensor-based mobile research projects. His primary research focuses on clinically validating the sensors in smartphones and smartwatches in patients with cardiovascular disease to further precision health implementation.
Hosted by: Garry Gold, M.D.
Sponsored by the PHIND Center and the Department of Radiology
Targeted violence continues against Black Americans, Asian Americans, and all people of color. The department of radiology diversity committee is running a racial equity challenge to raise awareness of systemic racism, implicit bias and related issues. Participants will be provided a list of resources on these topics such as articles, podcasts, videos, etc., from which they can choose, with the “challenge” of engaging with one to three media sources prior to our session (some videos are as short as a few minutes). Participants will meet in small-group breakout sessions to discuss what they’ve learned and share ideas.
Please reach out to Marta Flory, flory@stanford.edu with questions. For details about the session, including recommended resources and the Zoom link, please reach out to Meke Faaoso at mfaaoso@stanford.edu.