Montgomery County Research Articles

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Hybrid Learning of Hand-Crafted and Deep-Activated Features Using Particle Swarm Optimization and Optimized Support Vector Machine for Tuberculosis Screening

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading infectious killer, especially for people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Early diagnosis of TB is crucial for disease treatment and control. Radiology is a fundamental diagnostic tool used to screen or triage TB. Automated chest x-rays analysis can facilitate and expedite TB screening with fast and accurate reports of radiological findings and can rapidly screen large populations and alleviate a shortage of skilled experts in remote areas. We describe a hybrid feature-learning algorithm for automatic screening of TB in chest x-rays: it first segmented the lung regions using the DeepLabv3+ model. Then, six sets of hand-crafted features from statistical textures, local binary pattern, GIST, histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), pyramid histogram of oriented gradients and bags of visual words (BoVW), and nine sets of deep-activated features from AlexNet, GoogLeNet, InceptionV3, XceptionNet, ResNet-50, SqueezeNet, ShuffleNet, MobileNet, and DenseNet, were extracted. The dominant features of each feature set were selected using particle swarm optimization, and then separately input to an optimized support vector machine classifier to label ‘normal’ and ‘TB’ x-rays. GIST, HOG, BoVW from hand-crafted features, and MobileNet and DenseNet from deep-activated features performed better than the others. Finally, we combined these five best-performing feature sets to build a hybrid-learning algorithm. Using the Montgomery County (MC) and Shenzen datasets, we found that the hybrid features of GIST, HOG, BoVW, MobileNet and DenseNet, performed best, achieving an accuracy of 92.5% for the MC dataset and 95.5% for the Shenzen dataset.

Sustainable Society 2020: The case of ethnic preferences

Sustainable Society 2020: The case of ethnic preferences

Notes From the Field: Use of Emergency Medical Service Data to Augment COVID-19 Public Health Surveillance in Montgomery County, Maryland, From March to June 2020.

Epidemiologic and syndromic surveillance metrics traditionally used by public health departments can be enhanced to better predict hospitalization for coronavirus disease (COVID-19). In Montgomery County, Maryland, measurements of oxygen saturation (SpO2) by pulse oximetry obtained by the emergency medical service (EMS) were added to these traditional metrics to enhance the public health picture for decision makers. During a 78-day period, the rolling 7-day average of the percentage of EMS patients with SpO2 <94% had a stronger correlation with next-day hospital bed occupancy (Spearman ρ=0.58, 95% CI 0.40-0.71) than either the rolling 7-day average of the percentage of positive tests (ρ=0.55, 95% CI: 0.37-0.69) or the rolling 7-day average of the percentage of emergency department visits for COVID-19–like illness (ρ=0.49, 95% CI: 0.30-0.64). Health departments should consider adding EMS data to augment COVID-19 surveillance and thus improve resource allocation.

What is environmental racism for? Place-based harm and relational development

This paper argues that observed environmental racisms are instrumental to the development of white places. Rather than limiting the view of environmental harms to Black communities as spatial violence enacted via white NIMBYism, we argue that such spoilage is what produces white places. We call this process ‘creative extraction,’ the taking of resources from Black places to invest in white places. Those resources range from regressive sales tax revenues to water and sewer infrastructure to land devalued through waste disposal. Creative extraction involves seemingly unconnected actors reinforcing mutual interest in white spatial control and placemaking. Drawing on our case study of Montgomery County, Texas, we show how development, infrastructure, and environmental harm are intimately linked through legal and political contestation, and resource redistribution. We focus on Texas’ mechanism for creating new water infrastructure through ‘Municipal Utility Districts’ to illustrate how apolicy can create literal and symbolic boundaries to enable overdevelopment and underdevelopment. Our proposed vantage point on the relationship between communities can improve future research on both environmental racism and ‘the city’.

A GPU-based residual network for medical image classification in smart medicine

The recent advance of high-performance computing techniques like graphics processing unit (GPU) enables large-scale deep learning models for medical image analytics in smart medicine. Smart medicine has made great progress by applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) like ResNet and VGG-16 to medical image classification. However, various CNN models achieve very limited accuracy in some cases where multiple diseases are revealed in an X-ray image. This paper presents a variant ResNet model by replacing the global average pooling with the adaptive dropout for medical image classification. In order for the presented model to recognize multiple diseases (i.e., multi-label classification), we convert the multi-label classification to N binary classification by training the parameters of the presented model for N times. Finally, experiments are conducted on a GPU Cluster to evaluate the presented model on three datasets, namely Montgomery County chest X-ray set, Shenzhen X-ray set, and NIH chest X-ray set. The results show the presented model achieves a great performance improvement for medical image classification without a significant efficiency reduction compared to the traditional architecture and VGG-16.

Courtship, Community, and Conflict: Montgomery County in the Civil War

Vol. 1, No. 5 (2019)&#x0D; With contributions by Alison Mink. &#x0D; This issue of SourceLab presents correspondence from the McNitt family archive. The McNitts lived in Montgomery County, Illinois during the US Civil War.&#x0D; This publication is part of the digital documentary edition series SourceLab, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our Editorial Board conducts rigorous peer-review of every edition.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Diagnosis of Cardiac and Related Diseases.

Automatic chest anatomy segmentation plays a key role in computer-aided disease diagnosis, such as for cardiomegaly, pleural effusion, emphysema, and pneumothorax. Among these diseases, cardiomegaly is considered a perilous disease, involving a high risk of sudden cardiac death. It can be diagnosed early by an expert medical practitioner using a chest X-Ray (CXR) analysis. The cardiothoracic ratio (CTR) and transverse cardiac diameter (TCD) are the clinical criteria used to estimate the heart size for diagnosing cardiomegaly. Manual estimation of CTR and other diseases is a time-consuming process and requires significant work by the medical expert. Cardiomegaly and related diseases can be automatically estimated by accurate anatomical semantic segmentation of CXRs using artificial intelligence. Automatic segmentation of the lungs and heart from the CXRs is considered an intensive task owing to inferior quality images and intensity variations using nonideal imaging conditions. Although there are a few deep learning-based techniques for chest anatomy segmentation, most of them only consider single class lung segmentation with deep complex architectures that require a lot of trainable parameters. To address these issues, this study presents two multiclass residual mesh-based CXR segmentation networks, X-RayNet-1 and X-RayNet-2, which are specifically designed to provide fine segmentation performance with a few trainable parameters compared to conventional deep learning schemes. The proposed methods utilize semantic segmentation to support the diagnostic procedure of related diseases. To evaluate X-RayNet-1 and X-RayNet-2, experiments were performed with a publicly available Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) dataset for multiclass segmentation of the lungs, heart, and clavicle bones; two other publicly available datasets, Montgomery County (MC) and Shenzhen X-Ray sets (SC), were evaluated for lung segmentation. The experimental results showed that X-RayNet-1 achieved fine performance for all datasets and X-RayNet-2 achieved competitive performance with a 75% parameter reduction.

Judge rules against college

Case name: Wilson v. Montgomery County Board of Trustees, No. PWG‐17‐2784 (D. Md. 09/10/18).

Crossroads: Integration and segregation in suburban school districts

As U.S. suburbs become more racially and ethnically diverse, they have the opportunity to make their schools similarly diverse. But integration is not assured, even in districts with significant demographic diversity. Iris Rotberg draws on Montgomery County Public Schools, a suburban Maryland district, to illustrate the opportunities and risks present in many other suburban districts. While large numbers of Montgomery County students attend diverse schools, segregation is a growing problem in the higher-poverty schools, and Black and Latinx students attending these schools have become more segregated in recent years. At the same time, White and Asian students attending low-poverty schools are in more diverse environments. Rotberg considers how policies related to school boundaries, housing, charter schools, and district secession have affected the integration of suburban schools.

Intensive Cultural Resources Survey of the Proposed City of Conroe Stewarts Creek Wastewater System Improvements Project, Conroe, Montgomery County, Texas

Intensive Cultural Resources Survey of the Proposed City of Conroe Stewarts Creek Wastewater System Improvements Project, Conroe, Montgomery County, Texas

Documenting Slavery at the Local Level: Montgomery, Alabama; A Case Study

Documenting Slavery at the Local Level: Montgomery, Alabama; A Case Study Dallas Hanbury (bio) Slavery, a defining characteristic of american history, continues to impact communities across the country and the nation as a whole. From frustration over the role and place of Confederate monuments in public places to the historical under-representation of minorities in cultural institutions, slavery and its continuing effects constitute a phenomenon that is anything but forgotten, including in Alabama. Repositories in Alabama that house local public records, including the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), county courthouses, probate courts, circuit courts, historical societies, and archives have something to offer to the ongoing, multi-faceted discourse regarding slavery. These repositories hold a wide array of records, some possibly unknown or otherwise underused, that provide insight into how slavery manifested itself in communities across the state.1 These records greatly aid in documenting slavery at the local level and demonstrate how local histories of slavery in Alabama contribute to and fit within much [End Page 223] broader narratives regarding American slavery. A close reading of these records, many of which researchers can find on microfilm at ADAH and in Alabama county seats of government, probate courts, historical societies, and county archives, reveals a great deal of information about how Alabama communities constituted a part of, reacted to, and became shaped by the wider contexts in which American slavery existed, including antebellum finance, law, morality, race relations, territorial expansion, and more. Local government records also document that enslaved and formerly enslaved people constantly worked to carve out a space in which they made their own choices, created their own lives, and claimed and defended their humanity during the oppression of slavery and the turbulent times following emancipation. From running away, marrying during slavery—despite the knowledge that the law did not recognize such unions—negotiating the sale of their labor and their own working conditions post-slavery, to having marriages made during slavery legitimized following emancipation, African Americans in the South, specifically Montgomery County, Alabama, exhibited tremendous agency as they built their own worlds. Although local government records provide a wealth of information about how slavery manifested itself in Alabama communities, and therefore deserve attention, it remains important to consult other bodies of knowledge that help to contextualize the information found in local government records. Publications focused on the history of slavery and Reconstruction in Alabama demonstrate that a pattern exists in terms of what local records, and records of a broader context regarding slavery and its aftermath, researchers will find in Alabama. For example, in Michael W. Fitzgerald’s Reconstruction in Alabama and Anthony Gene Carey’s Sold Down the River, the authors show that a blend of local public records and other primary sources, including court records, census records, newspapers, and letters, provide illuminating insight into the history of slavery in Alabama and Georgia communities. In other words, published works suggest that researchers may find a degree of typicality among sources when researching slavery in Alabama communities. Such similarities constitute [End Page 224] a boon in that they provide researchers with a guide to beginning their inquiries into how slavery and its aftereffects manifested themselves in Alabama communities. However, as most researchers know, while typicality may exist among local records when researching certain topics, scholars should not take it for granted that such uniformities are universal; local public records will yield interesting surprises. This article aims to make interested, though perhaps less-experienced, non-professional historians aware of local government records related to slavery, and to help them understand how those records exist within a broader historical context. Professional historians have long known the value of, and have accordingly used, local government records in their research regarding all manner of subjects, including slavery. However, it remains important to remember that there exists a body of non-professional historians who may not know that local records, like those discussed in this piece, are available to scholars. This article does not provide an exhaustive list of local government records related to slavery; rather, using a selection of local government records from Montgomery County, Alabama, it provides a framework for engaging with and constructing narratives from local government...

Intensive Cultural Resources Survey of the Proposed West Fork of the San Jacinto River South Drainage Channel Phase 3 Project, Montgomery County, Texas

Intensive Cultural Resources Survey of the Proposed West Fork of the San Jacinto River South Drainage Channel Phase 3 Project, Montgomery County, Texas

Downstream evolution of wastewater treatment plant nutrient signals using high‐temporal monitoring

AbstractWastewater treatment plants are major point‐sources of nutrients to streams globally, but the impact on receiving streams is not always clear. Previous research has shown mixed responses in receiving streams, with some showing no net retention through in‐stream processing for large distances below plants and some showing high rates of processing and retention. This study focuses on Sandy Run, a small, suburban stream in Montgomery County, PA, that receives effluent from two plants, where effluent makes up an estimated 50% of outlet discharge at baseflow. Two sites were monitored in late summer baseflow using high‐temporal loggers to evaluate nitrate and phosphate retention with distance below the plants. Effluent quantity was monitored immediately below the effluent outfalls using specific conductivity as a conservative signal of solute fluctuations throughout the day. A site 1 km downstream showed diel nitrate changes, but despite moderate gross primary productivity and ecosystem respiration rates, there was little net retention of nutrients and the diel nitrate signal can be attributed to advection and dispersion of variable upstream effluent. A site 5.4 km below the plant showed a diel nitrate signal as well, but baseflow daily hysteresis plots of nitrate and specific conductivity showed the effluent and nitrate peaks did not coincide. Instead, the effluent input signal was seen overnight, but there was in‐stream removal and release processes during the day. Over the distance to this site, the stream was metabolizing some of the high nutrient loads, although gross primary productivity and ecosystem respiration rates were lower. It is important to understand subdaily changes in nutrient processing to fully quantify the impacts of effluent on small streams at different scales. Furthermore, looking at the diel signal without considering conservative transport would overestimate in‐stream processing.

The Vascular Flora of Haynes Bottoms Wildlife Management Area, Montgomery County, Tennessee

AbstractHaynes Bottom Wildlife Management Area is a 393-ha state-owned property in Montgomery County, Tennessee. Formerly agricultural, the property was purchased from private ownership in 1996 and includes Cumberland River bottomlands (ca. 180 ha) and level to rolling-sloping uplands (ca. 213 ha). It is managed by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency for wildlife enhancement and public usage. On-going management includes development of wetlands and moist-soil areas primarily for waterfowl in the bottomlands and plantings for agricultural crops and wildlife in the uplands. Based on twenty years of floristic studies, the known vascular flora consists of 605 species, with 153 of these non-natives; four species are elements of conservation concern. A description of the area, analyses of the flora, and an annotated list, are presented.

Child Advocacy Center intervention with sibling sexual abuse cases: Cross-cultural comparison of professionals’ perspectives and experiences

BackgroundDespite being a complex phenomenon with potentially significant short- and long-term consequences for all involved including siblings, parents and the family as a whole, sibling sexual abuse (SSA) has not received sufficient empirical and clinical attention. Practitioners are often left to cope without appropriate guidance. ObjectiveThis study aimed to compare staff perspectives and experiences of working with sibling sexual abuse cases across two Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) within different countries and different cultural and legal contexts. Participants and settingParticipants were staff members from two Child Advocacy Centers: one in Jerusalem, Israel, and the other in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States of America. MethodsThis qualitative cross-cultural comparative study analyzes staff experiences of sibling sexual abuse cases based upon 14 focus groups, in Jerusalem (N = 7) and Montgomery County (N = 7). ResultsFindings reveal that both CACs focused on parents, the parents’ negative emotional responses to SSA, and the impossible nature of their predicament. The Montgomery County CAC tended to emphasize the needs of the victim while being attuned to the legal proceedings, whereas the Jerusalem CAC emphasized supportive therapeutic responses for the whole family. ConclusionsThe differences across the two Child Advocacy Centers are related to the different legal and cultural contexts of the two CACs and underscore the need to review what may be the most appropriate policy and practice response to SSA that does not itself cause further harm.

Unlocking the Potential of Older Adult Volunteers: The Intergenerational Leadership Institute Model as a Resource for Bolstering Extension

The Intergenerational Leadership Institute (ILI) is a yearlong certificate training program developed by Pennsylvania State University for older adults (55-plus) seeking new lifelong learning and civic engagement experiences and opportunities to contribute to innovation and change in their communities. Data from participant surveys and observations of ILI-related training and program planning sessions indicate growth in participants' intergenerational programming and leadership skills in the context of translating intervention ideas into concrete plans and programs. This article describes the process and outcomes of ILI chapters in State College, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery County, Maryland, and tools and resources for assisting with program dissemination.

Patterns of non-prescribed buprenorphine and other opioid use among individuals with opioid use disorder: A latent class analysis

AimNon-prescribed buprenorphine (NPB) use increased in the US. This study aims to characterize heterogeneity in patterns of NPB and other opioid use among individuals with current opioid use disorder. MethodsThe study recruited 356 participants in Dayton (Montgomery County), Ohio, area in 2017–2018 using targeted and Respondent Driven Sampling. Participants met the following criteria: 1) 18 years or older, 2) current moderate/severe opioid use disorder (DSM-5), 3) past 6-month NPB use. Latent class analysis (LCA) was conducted to identify subgroups based on past 6-month (days of NPB and heroin/fentanyl use; use of NPB to get high; use of non-prescribed and prescribed pharmaceutical opioids; participation in formal treatment) and lifetime (years since first NPB and other illicit opioid use) characteristics. Selected auxiliary variables were compared across classes using Asparouhov and Muthén's 3-step approach. Results49.7% were female, and 88.8% were non-Hispanic whites. 89% used NPB to self-treat withdrawal. LCA resulted in three classes: "Heavy Heroin/Fentanyl Use" (61%), "More Formal Treatment Use" (29%) and "Intense NPB Use" (10%). After adjusting for multiple testing, the following past 6-month variables differed significantly between classes: injection as a primary route of heroin/fentanyl administration (p < 0.001), cocaine use (p = 0.044), unintentional drug overdose (p = 0.023), and homelessness (p = 0.044), with the "Intense NPB Use" class having the lowest prevalences. ConclusionPredominance of self-treatment goals and the association between more intense NPB use and lower risks of adverse consequences suggest potential harm minimization benefits of NPB use. More research is needed to understand consequences of NPB use over time.

EARNED INCOME TAX CREDITS AND INFANT HEALTH

In 1998, Montgomery County, Maryland adopted a local earned income tax credit (EITC) program. We use U.S. Vital Statistics data covering births in Maryland from 1995 to 2004 to examine whether the local EITC impacted birth weight and the probability of low birth weight in Montgomery County. Using difference-in-differences (DD) and triple differences (DDD) strategies, we find that the Montgomery County EITC decreased the probability of low birth weight by 1.9 to 2.4 percentage points among likely eligible mothers. Using the local credit as a unique opportunity to identify EITC effects within a state, these estimates contribute to a growing body of literature that finds improved birth outcomes for credit recipients.

Montgomery County: Helping Neighbors with Food Insecurity

Develop a growing program in the form of a community garden that includes resources and materials necessary for sustaining new sources of fresh produce.