HJAR Nov/Dec 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  NOV / DEC 2024 29 For weekly eNews updates and to read the journal online, visit HealthcareJournalAR.com INBRE program. The grant supplement will allow scientists at UA Fayetteville and ACRI to collab- orate on the development of software tools and analytical processes to streamline the production and analysis of a large maternal health dataset that ACRI has been collecting. “It’s a tremendously rich data set,” Cornett said. “It isn’t replicated anywhere else. The beauty of this supplement is that it shows the NIH recog- nizes it’s important to support this research being done in Arkansas.” The data “is right now kind of tucked away, but this will help it become more available to more investigators, in a form where it’s useful.” “The infrastructure will support research stud- ies of mother and child health at the Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center and clinical research programs within Arkansas Children’s Hospital,” said Colin Kay, PhD, a professor of pediatrics at UAMS who directs Precision Health Research at ACRI and is overseeing the project. “We’re using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help us make connections between these rich datas- ets. It’s really next level in helping us generate new hypotheses and studies.” Kay, a nutritional biochemist and expert in inter- preting and organizing nutrition health data, will work with experts at UA Fayetteville who special- ize in complex databases. Xintao Wu, PhD, professor of electrical engi- neering and computer science, will lead efforts to build the software applications, data infrastruc- ture and dashboards in collaboration with Kay and researchers at ACRI. Wu is the director of the Data Science Core within the Arkansas Integra- tive Metabolic Research Center (AIMRC), an NIH- designated Center of Biomedical Research Excel- lence (COBRE) on the UA Fayetteville campus. As part of the AIMRC, Wu and the Data Science Core specialize in artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches to elucidate relationships between large imaging, bioenergetics, genomic, and pro- teomic data sets. Wu’s expertise in developing novel AI algo- rithms and tools for complex data, especially those with challenging attributes like noise, and imbalance, will be pivotal. “Our team will develop an integrated data and cloud infrastructure, an integrative knowl- edge database, and an interactive dashboard to support storage, management, integration, anal- ysis and visualization of multi-omics and pheno- typic data from this project and existing data- bases, for women’s precision health,” Wu said. “We are excited to conduct this collaborative project which potentially brings modern AI and computing to biomedical research.” Kyle Quinn, PhD, professor of Biomedical Engi- neering and director of the AIMRC, brings addi- tional experience with AI solutions for biomedi- cal problems. He will collaborate closely with Wu to identify data science solutions through the AIMRC Data Science Core and support the devel- opment of training modules for the analysis tools. This collaboration among UAMS, ACRI, and UA Fayetteville grew from conversations following an invited talk by Kay as part of the AIMRC’s seminar series during the fall of 2023. Kay and Alan Tack- ett, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecu- lar biology at UAMS, discussed collaborative data science opportunities with Quinn. “We quickly realized that we should bring Larry Cornett and Xintao Wu into the fold,” said Quinn. “Leveraging the expertise of our AIMRC Data Science Core to help interpret the rich dataset from ACRI is a great example of natural synergy between two NIH IDeA programs here in Arkan- sas — the Arkansas INBRE and AIMRC COBRE.” “It really is collaborative science — team sci- ence,” said Kay. “We have the data and domain expertise, and they have the expertise to build tools to connect the data and analyze it.” “We’ve had clinical studies going on for more than 13 years that are all related to women’s maternal health and the effects on the imprint- ing of the child and continued development,” Kay said, referring to ACRI. “We’ve had more than 30 or 40 people involved in the collection and pro- cessing of the data. My goal is how to better uti- lize the data to get the most use out of it.” “In building the platform, we’re using some of our internal data, but once built, the platform could be used to integrate data that has been collected from others,” Kay said, citing data from “precision nutrition” and “precision medicine” initiatives that ACRI is involved in. Precision med- icine refers to a highly personalized approach to prevention and treatment that encompasses indi- vidual variables such as genetics and lifestyles. “Our primary goal is to develop the data informatics scaffold in order to establish a search- able women’s health dashboard that supports precision nutrition and health initiatives in IDeA states and beyond,” according to an abstract out- lining the aims of the project. “This is the first step,” Kay said, “to build this tool to be available for researchers. But once it’s developed, I see it having utility beyond research. People and their physicians could use it to make informed choices for their diet and health.” He said precision medicine combined with pre- cision nutrition equals precision health, which “is a very hot topic right now in science.” “In the field of nutrition that we’re studying now,” Kay said, “the mother’s diet can have a pro- found effect on the fetus. If we can make moth- ers healthier and find ways to remove complica- tions, we can put their children on a trajectory for success.” “The need to improve maternal health care in Arkansas is clear, and this has been highlighted by many state leaders and health care professionals this year,” said Quinn. “Our NIH-funded collab- oration is an opportunity to apply state-of-the-art data science approaches to gain a better under- standing of how we can improve the health of mothers and their children in Arkansas.” Cornett said that in 1990, the NIH established the Office of Research on Women’s Health, and it came up with the idea for the supplements to include more women in NIH-supported clinical tri- als, which is necessary to improve women’s health outcomes. The supplement brings the total that Arkan- sas INBRE has received from the NIH to date to $78.8 million. Baptist Health Pregnancy Clinic- Little Rock Holds Ribbon Cutting Baptist Health Pregnancy Clinic-Little Rock held a celebratory ribbon cutting on Oct. 2 before the clinic officially opens later this month. James Studdard, MD; Jennifer Dorris, APRN; and Marie Lehman, APRN, will see patients at the clinic which offers prenatal and postpartum care. Moms also will be connected with the maternal infant home visiting program and community health resources. Studdard has more than 50 years of experience in obstetrics and gynecology. He graduated from