Rifat Zahan

University of Saskatchewan | U of S · Department of Computer Science

Annual deaths from opioid overdoses have increased continuously over the past 20 years in the United States. This modern plague has precipitated serious adverse social impacts at both the individual and social level. Estimating and predicting the opioid epidemic trend is helpful for public health agencies making intervention policies but is greatly...

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death and the rate of suicide-related death is increasing worldwide. Suicide is associated with significant social, economic and health-system cost. The occurrence of suicide sometimes leads to "copycat" effect, which is historically prevalent in adolescents or younger adults. Literature suggests that a "copy...

Background: Over the past 12 years, suicide deaths in Canada have ranged between 3,500 and 4,400 deaths per years, while age-standardized suicide mortality rates have remained generally stable between 11 and 12 deaths per 100,000 population. Suicide deaths have significant impacts at a community, family and individual level. Suicide attempts someti...

BACKGROUND: Spirometric prediction equations are used to evaluate lung function in the clinical setting. However, such equations are not yet available for First Nations populations. The purpose of this study is to derive appropriate spirometric reference equations for a group of Cree First Nations school-aged children and adolescents living in rura...

Background: Unsafe pregnancy termination is a major public health concern among reproductive-aged women in many developing countries. This study evaluated the socio-demographic characteristics, as well as residual spatial correlation in pregnancy termination among Bangladeshi women. Methods: Secondary data was obtained from the Bangladesh Demogr...

Social media may play a role in the “contagion” mechanism thought to underpin suicide clusters. Our pilot case-control study presented a novel methodological approach to examining whether Facebook activity following cluster and non-cluster suicides differed. We used a scan statistic to identify suicide cluster cases occurring in spatiotemporal clus...

The objective of this study is to predict suicidal and non-suicidal deaths from DNA methylation data using a modern machine learning algorithm. We used support vector machines to classify existing secondary data consisting of normalized values of methylated DNA probe intensities from tissues of two cortical brain regions to distinguish suicide case...

PURPOSE: Spirometric prediction equations are used to evaluate lung function in the clinical setting. However, such equations are not yet available for First Nations populations in Canada. The purpose of this study is to derive appropriate spirometric reference equations for a group of Prairie and Woodland Cree First Nations school-aged children an...

PURPOSE: Spirometric prediction equations are used to evaluate lung function in the clinical setting. However, such equations are not yet available for First Nations populations in Canada. The purpose of this study is to derive appropriate spirometric reference equations for a group of Prairie and Woodland Cree First Nations school-aged children an...

Abstract. Annual deaths from opioid overdoses have increased contin- uously over the past 20 years in the United States. This modern plague has precipitated serious adverse social impacts at both the individual and social level. Estimating and predicting the opioid epidemic trend is helpful for public health agencies making intervention policies bu...

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death. Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the risk factors for committing suicide. Epigenetic data may help to distinguish suicidal and non-suicidal deaths. The objective of this study is to use machine learning to predict suicidal and non-suicidal deaths from DNA methylation data. We used support-vect...

Abstract: Suicide is one of the leading causes of death. Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the risk factors for committing suicide. Epigenetic data may help to distinguish suicidal and non-suicidal deaths. The objective of this study is to use machine learning to predict suicidal and non-suicidal deaths from DNA methylation data. We used su...

Introduction: Infant and child mortality is an important indicator of the social and economic well-being of a population. Bangladesh, a country in south Asia, has traditionally had a high child mortality rate. But there has been recent progress in reducing the under-five mortality rate, including progress in education, public health, and population...