Computational Ophthalmology

In this important study, Dr. Cecilia Lee, Dr. Aaron Lee, and their co-authors used census and mapping data to quantify how far Medicare patients travel to access eye care in the contiguous United States. This type of information about medically underserved geographic areas is essential for improving access to care. The authors note that the issue of rural access to care has been cited as a reason for increasing the number of eye care providers in the United States. Some providers also use access to care as an argument for increasing optometrists' responsibilities and scope of practice.

Continue reading "Evaluating Access to Eye Care in the Contiguous United States by Calculated Driving Time in the United States Medicare Population"

In this study, the authors address a relatively new computational challenge: how to to rapidly and accurately identify species-level DNA sequences from next generation metagenomic shotgun sequencing data. NCBI Genbank (v209), the ever-growing library of sequenced DNA fragments mapped to an identified taxonomy species, has an enormous catalog (1.99 x 10¹¹ basepairs of cDNA and genomic DNA from 1.87 x 10⁸ records at the time of this study). Sequence alignment software is used to match unknown DNA sequences to the catalog of identified genetic data, but new approaches are needed to manage the increasing data. In this study, the authors aimed to validate a Scalable Metagenomics Alignment Research Tool (SMART), a novel searching heuristic for shotgun metagenomics sequencing results.

Continue reading "Scalable metagenomics alignment research tool (SMART): a scalable, rapid, and complete search heuristic for the classification of metagenomic sequences from complex sequence populations"