MISSISSIPPI ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

SEVENTY-THIRD ANNUAL MEETING February 25-27, 2009 Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center Olive Branch, MS

Supported by

University of Mississippi Medical Center

MISSISSIPPI ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, SEVENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING

strains/species of Listeria. We designed custom software in Python to test this hypothesis. Our program calls stand-alone BLAST and does a comparison of all protein coding genes in the species/strains under consideration. Genes are considered to be orthologs if they share 70% identity over 70% of their length. In our experiment we used 6 genome sequences: 4 L. monocytogenes strains, one L. innocua strain, and one L. welshimeri strain. Genes are classified into one of three groups: 1) core genes shared by all species/strains; 2) distributed genes shared by more than one but not all species/strains, and 3) unique genes occurring in only one species/strain. Initial experiments demonstrated that many genes of Listeria welshimeri are not shared with the other species/strains. Of the five remaining species/strains, a total of 3,816 orthologous clusters were found, and 2,187 (57%) of those contained all of the strains. Our findings provide evidence supporting the DGH among the 4 Listeria monocytogenes strains and the Listeria innocua strain, but the Listeria welshimeri strain is more divergent and does not appear to be included in this supragenome group. O9.12 3:35 BAYESIAN NETWORKS FOR MEDICAL DECISION SUPPORT Jyotirmay Gadewadikar, Ognjen Kuljaca, Kwabena Agyepong, Erol Sarigul, Yufeng Zheng Alcorn State University Bayesian networks have an unparallel advantage of being able exploit the explicit structure of the domain model to derive a graphical representation for learning. The encoding of independencies in the network topology admits the design of efficient procedures for performing computations over the network. A Bayesian Network is a graphical model that represents relationships of probabilistic nature among variables of interest. This paper gives an introduction to the Bayesian networks for the exploration of implementing an automated breast cancer detection support tool at Systems Research Institute, Alcorn State University. It is intuitive that Bayesian networks are employed as one viable option for computer-aided detection by representing the relationships between diagnoses, physical findings, laboratory test results, and imaging study findings. Physiological knowledge has a typical causal representation, which can be used in diagnostic expert systems to provide suitable explanations of the cause-effect relationships connecting findings with diagnostic conclusions. The experience gained in a diagnostic expert system combining heuristic and causal knowledge, makes it possible to use physiological information in assessing, the compatibility and consistency of diagnostic conclusions. In addition it provides the opportunity of using the causal network to inquire directly about the domain, entering the system at different levels (findings, states and hypotheses) independently from patient data. In this paper a brief background concerning causal networks, probability theory and Bayesian networks is given The paper will also provide January 2009, Vol 54, No. 1

various tools available to realize inference algorithms in the context of Bayesian Network including the description of the implementation steps. THURSDAY EVENING GRAND BALLROOM 6:00 Dodgen Reception and Poster Session Grand Ballroom Please set up between 4:00p and 4:30p

P9.01 DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING A PORTAL FOR THE POLAR GRID HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SYSTEM AT ELIZABETH CITY STATE UNIVERSITY Jonathan Henderson1, Jeff Wood1, Camden Hearn1, Patrina Bly1, Justin Deloatch1 1 Elizabeth City State University, 2Mississippi Valley State University Polar Grid is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program funded partnership of Indiana University (IU) and Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) to acquire and deploy the computing infrastructure needed to investigate the urgent problems in glacial melting. When fully completed the grid will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and computer clusters deployed in the field in the Polar Regions and two large scale computing clusters for detailed analysis in the U.S. - one to be installed at IU and the other at ECSU. This installation will give ECSU a 5 Teraflop Minority Serving Institution High Performance Computing (MSI HPC) system, building on its distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure to create tremendous outreach capabilities. Accessing this computing cluster will entail the development of a grid portal that provides security, access to data, the ability to process data, and education/outreach functions. Development of this portal started with the documentation of terms, processes, and software needed to develop a portal and the understanding of what the grid is. This project then progressed to produce Extensible Markup Language (XML) page structures that could display processed data acquired during expeditions in Greenlandand Antarctica. Another aspect has been the development of "iGoogle Gadgets" that simulate the portal user environmentalong with the process of converting that gadget into an RSS feed. P9.02 TECHINAL LIBRARY DATABASE UPDATE Gabrielle Meeks Mississippi Valley State University At NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Facilities Management Division has to perform an annually update of their technical library database. This database is self-service oriented library where individuals can check out manuals and return them 91