PSM in Biomedical and Health Informatics Program – Internship Presentations

Students in the Professional Science Master’s in Biomedical and Health Informatics Program complete an internship that synthesizes knowledge gleaned from the program curriculum. The purpose of the internship is to expand classroom learning to include “hands-on” experience in health IT.

In this occasion Susmitha Chilukuri, Allie Gartland, Adnan Lakdawala will be presenting their internship projects via Zoom.

Titles and abstracts below:

Sentiment and Emotion analysis with topic modelling of COVID-19 tweets

Presenter: Susmitha Chilukuri

Abstract: Social media data, here in this case twitter is used to collect the tweets relevant to COVID-19 from January to July 2020 and topic modelling is done to identify top trending topics among social media related to COVID-19 and finally sentiment and emotion analysis is conducted for each topic to analyze the underlying public opinions/emotions. This helps to understand what the public interests and perspectives are along with what kind of information is being posted and shared among them in relation to this pandemic, leading to identifying strategies to use social media for public health communication and education with preventing spread of misinformation at the same time.

Patient Tracking Chatbot Platform: What are patients doing outside of the healthcare setting?

Presenter: Allie Gartland

Abstract: What are patients doing outside of the doctor’s office, and how are we tracking it? The answer for most healthcare systems is: we’re not. After rigorous market research into available chatbot technology, we selected a platform called Chirrp. We then developed conversations in the following segments: sleep, diet, physical activity, and mental health. All conversations were logged into a database along with the user journey for each patient. We plan to pilot this program in the coming weeks and analyze the collected data. This data could help provide new insights into patient habits at home and how those habits impact their overall health.

Evaluating the clinical and economic burden of NASH and the importance of diagnostics. 

Presenter: Adnan Lakdawala

Abstract: Rise in the incidence of obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome, heart disease and unhealthy lifestyle choices are a few of the reasons for an estimated 25% of the global prevalence of Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). NAFLD is a complex chronic liver disease that encompasses a range of fatty liver diseases ranging from simple steatosis to steatohepatitis to cirrhosis in individuals without significant alcohol consumption. A study estimated around 64 million NAFLD cases in the United States, with an estimated annual burden of $103 billion. However, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis(NASH), which is a part of NAFLD, has an estimated prevalence of 6% in the general population and is the second most common cause of Liver transplants after Hepatitis C. Moreover, studies have shown that patients with NASH have higher liver-related mortality rates and higher risks of developing Hepatocellular-Carcinoma. Despite the abundance of information available on NAFLD and NASH's various clinical implications, hardly any literature is published to showcase the economic impacts of the disease. Hence, our project aimed to evaluate the clinical aspects of NASH and estimate the economic burden of illness whilst researching the NASH diagnostic space at the same time.