A team of University of Florida researchers led by Yi Guo, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics in the UF College of Medicine, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to identify geographic hotspots of low adherence to lung cancer screening in veterans.
Through the project, funded by the Veterans Affairs Center of Innovation on Disability & Rehab Research, the team will build geospatial models to examine how race and rurality interact with social determinants of health to impact lung cancer screening adherence in veterans.
The new project aligns with the mission of the UF Health Cancer Center by studying disparities in cancer screening for one of the center’s priority cancers. In the geographical area that the UF Health Cancer Center serves, the incidence of lung cancer is higher for women and men and both the white and Black populations than state rates.
Guo, a member of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Control & Population Sciences research program, is collaborating on the new project with Mi Jung Lee, Ph.D., BSOT, a research assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch; Jiang Bian, Ph.D., professor and division director of biomedical informatics in the department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics; and Aokun Chen, Ph.D., an assistant scientist in the department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics.
Guo and Bian, who serves as chief data scientist and chief research information officer at UF Health, are also co-directors of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Informatics Shared Resource, which is supporting the new project.
