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Predicting Health Risks from Placental Functions

This website is prepared by Jen-Mei Chang, Ph.D. at California State University, Long Beach for the teaching of MATH479/579 in spring 2011. With the help of Dr. Carolyn M. Salafia MD MS, Perinatal Pathologist from the Placental Analytics, LLC, the ultimate goal of this ground-breaking study is to develop mathematically quantifiable placental measurements that can be used to better understand how newborn, childhood, and potentially adult diseases have their genesis in gestational stress. Particularly, Dr. Salafia and her research group have successfully made connections between shapes of placenta and child's birth weight; placental weight and birth weight; placental efficiency and placental shapes, to name a few. Albeit the efforts, it is still a hugely open problem how the shape of a placenta may help predict risks of adult diseases in a semi-automatic fashion.

Background

Recent medical research indicates that the placenta may be the "crystal ball" for the health of the baby. The placenta is the source of nutrition, oxygen, and blood for the developing fetus so any problems with the placenta may become a problem for the baby. An analysis of the placenta may help predict risks for certain diseases that develop in the womb such as diabetes, autism, and heart disease. In particular, the structure of the blood vessel network as well as the shape of the human placenta may contain important medical clues. In simplest terms, the vasculature is like an irrigation network for the placenta and if any part of the network is missing or unconnected then this may indicate that the placenta (and hence the fetus) did not receive adequate blood flow.

Project Description

Using placenta images provided by Placental Analytics LLC, you are encouraged to study any mathematical features of human placentas that could potentially be useful in making predictions about health risks in young adults. The ultimate goal is to provide doctors a method in using digital images of placentas to distinguish healthy vs. unhealthy babies.

Data

Some References

Homework

Please click on the appropriate link for the course syllabus and schedule.

homework 2 first image homework 2 second image homework 2 third image

example annotated bibliography Note: you may use JabRef to organize your references or simply use your LaTeX editor to update your .bib file. For example, an entry in your .bib file may look like the following:

@ARTICLE{Yampolsky2009,
author = {M. Yampolsky and C. Salafia and O. Shlakhter and D. Haas and B. Eucker and J. Thorp},
title = {Centrality of the Umbilical Cord Insertion in a Human Placenta Influences the Placental Efficiency},
journal = {Placenta},
year = {2009},
volume = {30},
pages = {1058-1064},
comment = {Previous works of Dr. Yampolsky on human placenta and placental pathology.},
owner = {sheauguai},
timestamp = {2010.06.24},
notes={},
}
After bibtex compilation, the entry looks like the following in the pdf output:
[12] M. Yampolsky, C. Salafia, O. Shlakhter, D. Haas, B. Eucker, and J. Thorp. Centrality of the Umbilical Cord Insertion in a Human Placenta Influences the Placental Efficiency. Placenta, 30:1058-1064, 2009.