University of Central Florida

Cancer health disparities that exist in the Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino/x communities are scientific challenges, yet there are limited team science approaches to mitigate these challenges. This article's purpose is to evaluate the team science collaborations of the National Institutes of Health-funded Florida-California Cancer Research, Education & Engagement (CaRE2 ) Center partnership underscoring the inclusion of multidisciplinary team members and future under-represented minority (URM) cancer researchers...

In May 2022, the American College of Cardiology updated their guideline-directed medical therapy for congestive heart failure (CHF) to include four pillars of therapy. These pillars aim to better control patients with heart failure (HF) and reduce the incidence of hospitalization by including an evidence-based beta-blocker, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/ angiotensin receptor blocker/angiotensin receptor/ neprilysin inhibitor, a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, and newly recommended sodium glucose cotransporter 2-inhibitors...

Introduction  Resource overload describes the feeling medical students experience in choosing formal (faculty-prescribed) and informal study resources (not faculty-prescribed). This study aims to characterize students' use and perceptions of formal and informal study resources to inform their use in medical education. Methods  This is a mixed-methods study utilizing a convenience sample of first-year medical students enrolled at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine during the academic year 2020-2021...

Biotechnology students entering the workforce often struggle in their application of textbook knowledge to build the solutions that we see in science and health fields today. Some students may be naive to what a job in the biotechnology industry can encompass. Students should graduate having a firm grasp of the prospects of their field and have the confidence to begin contributing to the growth of the industry. For this, it is necessary for students to be able to start practising applications in their coursework before they graduate...

PURPOSE: Clinical reasoning is vitally important for practitioners across the health professions. However, the assessment of clinical reasoning remains a significant challenge. Combined with other assessment methods, non-workplace-based assessment can increase opportunities to address multiple components of clinical reasoning, evaluate growth, and foster learning, but tools with validity evidence to assess clinical reasoning outside the workplace are scare. This study examined validity evidence for a novel clinical reasoning mapping exercise (CResME)...

Building great teams who can act rapidly and training energetic leaders who are empowered to innovate have been central themes in my leadership journey: Career reflections of Charles J. Lockwood, MD, MHCM, dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine and executive vice president of USF Health at the University of South Florida (USF).

Background Interactive patient cases have been shown to be a valuable resource in medical education. Previous studies have demonstrated that using patients as teachers can help students improve clinical reasoning and have educational benefits; however, there is limited research on student feedback on patients as teachers. The objective of this study is to evaluate second-year medical students' (MS2s) perceptions of patient encounters during the teaching of the Skin and Musculoskeletal System Course (BMS 6635)...

Plasmodium is a genus of parasites that comprises different species. The species falciparum, vivax, malariae, ovale, and knowlesi are known to cause a vector-borne illness called malaria, and among these, falciparum is known to cause major complications. The vector, the Anopheles mosquito, is commonly found in warmer regions close to the equator, and hence transmission and numbers of cases tend to be higher in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America. The number of cases of malaria in the United States has remained stable over the years with low transmission rates, and the disease is mostly seen in the population with a recent travel history to endemic regions...

With the maturity of intelligent technology such as human-computer interaction, human action recognition (HAR) technology has been widely used in virtual reality, video surveillance, and other fields. However, the current video-based HAR methods still cannot fully extract abstract action features, and there is still a lack of action collection and recognition for special personnel such as prisoners and elderly people living alone. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a multidimensional feature fusion network, called P-MTSC3D, a parallel network based on context modeling and temporal adaptive attention module...

Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a central nervous system disease caused by the human polyomavirus 2 that usually occurs in a setting of immunodeficiency. PML without overt immunosuppression is considered a rare occurrence but has been described in multiple previous case reports and series. Its prevalence, overall frequency, and prognosis are largely unknown. This is a single-center retrospective review of all University of Florida cases with the ICD10 PML diagnosis code (A81.2). PML without overt immunosuppression was defined as absence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, hematological malignancy, immunomodulatory/-suppressive medications, autoimmune conditions with a propensity for PML (sarcoidosis, systemic lupus erythematosus)...

Coffee leaf rust (CLR), caused by Hemileia vastatrix Berk. & Broome (Zaghouaniaceae) is considered the most significant fungal disease of Coffea arabica L. (Rubiaceae), from which berries are harvested and processed to obtain coffee beverage (Talhinhas et al. 2017). In Florida, coffee plants are mainly used as ornamentals due to their fragrant flowers; however, there are ongoing field trials evaluating the adaptability of plants for coffee production to climate conditions in the state (Crane et al. 2005)...

Cucurbita moschata, commonly known as squash or pumpkin, is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family originating from Central America. This species is regarded as heat tolerant and disease resistant and is commonly used in breeding programs. Calabaza (wintersquash) is an emerging market type of C. moschata with increasing popularity in the United States; however, limited research has been conducted to understand how sensory qualities influence consumers' acceptability and willingness to pay (price). This study compared the sensory perception of C...

BACKGROUND: The Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), a narrative summary of each student's academic and professional performance in US medical school is long, making it challenging for residency programs evaluating large numbers of applicants. OBJECTIVE: To create a rubric to assess MSPE narratives and to compare the ability of 3 commercially available machine learning models (MLMs) to rank MSPEs in order of positivity. METHODS: Thirty out of a possible 120 MSPEs from the University of Central Florida class of 2020 were de-identified and subjected to manual scoring and ranking by a pair of faculty members using a new rubric based on the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education competencies, and to global sentiment analysis by the MLMs...

With the implementation of new intensive care unit (ICU) therapies in the 1970s, multiple organ failure (MOF) emerged as a fulminant inflammatory phenotype leading to early ICU death. Over the ensuing decades, with fundamental advances in care, this syndrome has evolved into a lingering phenotype of chronic critical illness (CCI) leading to indolent late post-hospital discharge death. In 2012, the University of Florida (UF) Sepsis Critical Illness Research Center (SCIRC) coined the term Persistent Inflammation, Immunosuppression, and Catabolism Syndrome (PICS) to provide a mechanistic framework to study CCI in surgical patients...

Objective: To investigate collegiate aviation pilots' quality of sleep and psychological distress levels. Participants: Collegiate aviation pilots from a Code of Federal Regulations Part 141 four-year degree-awarding university in central Florida ( N  = 192). Method: The Pittsburgh Sleepiness Quality Index and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale were utilized to assess the participants' subjective quality sleep and psychological distress levels, respectively. A Spearman's rank-order correlation was run to assess the relationship between quality sleep and distress levels in collegiate aviation student pilots...

For quite some time, food systems scholars, public health workers, and food justice activists have recognized structural problems in the global food system that can cause food insecurity and inequitable access to nutritious foods. The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying disruption in food supply chains (FSCs) exposed these problems and raised questions about how community gardening and urban agriculture might offer some solutions. In this article, we examine the effects of the pandemic on the operations of community gardens in Central Florida and the attempts of these gardens to address the disruption in food supplies in their local communities...

Assessing perceptions and attitudes of advocacy in adolescent populations is an important area of research. Previous studies have shown that advocacy programs in high schools are well-received and help promote health advocacy. This pilot study took place at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine Health Leaders Summer Academy hosted by medical students of the Student National Medical Association. A one-hour interactive workshop was administered to high school students interested in the healthcare field...

Use of e-cigarettes have become an important public health concern in the US, particularly among those with health issues like asthma, which has remained high over the last decade. We examined associations between lifetime e-cigarette use and traditional cigarette use, cannabis use, and related health factors among community members with a history of asthma in North Central Florida. Data came from HealthStreet, a University of Florida community engagement program. Adults with a history of asthma (n = 1,475) were interviewed between 2014 and 2021...

Coastal marine ecosystems worldwide are increasingly affected by tide alterations and anthropogenic disturbances affecting the water quality and leading to frequent algal blooms. Increased bloom persistence is a serious threat due to the long-lasting impacts on ecological processes and services, such as carbon cycling and sequestration. The exploration of eco-environmental feedback and algal bloom patterns remains challenging and poorly investigated, mostly due to the paucity of data and lack of model-free approaches to infer universal bloom dynamics...

BACKGROUND: Andrews analysis is a tool to establish the aesthetic anteroposterior position of the maxilla. Andrews analysis has not been evaluated through computer-aided surgical simulation (CASS). PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of Andrews profile analysis when performed in the virtual environment. STUDY DESIGN, SETTING, SAMPLE: A retrospective cohort study was implemented with consecutive patients undergoing orthognathic surgery between February 2020 and February 2022 at the University of Alabama, Birmingham...