To assist these officials and limit the biological agent’s spread, Eva Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare (CORMH), has created software to analyze the biological and demographic data. The software will even monitor social media for real time information on the outbreak.
“We have developed a real-time system that will gather the demographics of the region that is being affected, and also pick up on-the-ground-data about who is available and doing what, and about movement of the affected population,” said Lee. “Our work is the first to take demographic information and real-time population behaviour and interlace it with the biological information to come up with a decision that health officials can actually use.”
Recently, Lee represented CORMH (a division of Georgia Tech’s H. Miltion Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering) as chair for the “Emergency Response and Community Resilience via Engineering and Computational Advances” panel at the 2014 AAAS meeting in Chicago.
The Georgia Tech professor has an impressive resume, having helped the government respond to the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, coordinated the response to the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, and assisted the radiation screenings after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. Lee has even helped to set out an emergency response plan for potential anthrax outbreaks.
“The big challenge in a pandemic is how do you use all of this information to determine the best strategy that will give you the minimum number of total infections and mortality rate,” expressed Lee.
To properly determine a treatment method, information on the characteristic of the biological agent, population statistics (pregnancies, children, elderly) and risk factors like illness severity or compromised immune systems (HIV positive) must all be taken into consideration.
“We can do a real-time optimization to tell you exactly what are the sites that you should set up and who should be going where,” Lee adds.
Her software can determine nuances such as personnel, vaccine and resource allocation to limit the spread. The program can even optimize (based on reduced infection) the distribution of vaccines to at-risk populations vs. the general public and where to best locate medical sites to avoid traffic.
Source: Georgia Tech