Lancaster, Mary J | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2014

Disease Prediction Models and Operational Readiness

INTRODUCTION: The objective of this manuscript is to present a systematic review of biosurveillance models that operate on select agents and can forecast the occurrence of a disease event. One of the primary goals of this research was to characterize the viability of biosurveillance models to provide operationally relevant information for decision makers to identify areas for future research. Two critical characteristics differentiate this work from other infectious disease modeling reviews. First, we reviewed models that attempted to predict the disease event, not merely its transmission dynamics. Second, we considered models involving pathogens of concern as determined by the US National Select Agent Registry (as of June 2011). Methods: We searched dozens of commercial and government databases and harvested Google search results for eligible models utilizing terms and phrases provided by public health analysts relating to biosurveillance, remote sensing, risk assessments, spatial epidemiology, and ecological niche-modeling, The publication date of search results returned are bound by the dates of coverage of each database and the date in which the search was performed, however all searching was completed by December 31, 2010. This returned 13,767 webpages and 12,152 citations. After de-duplication and removal of extraneous material, a core collection of 6,503 items was established and these publications along with their abstracts are presented in a semantic wiki at http://BioCat.pnnl.gov. Next, PNNL’s IN-SPIRE visual analytics software was used to cross-correlate these publications with the definition for a biosurveillance model resulting in the selection of 54 documents that matched the criteria resulting Ten of these documents, However, dealt purely with disease spread models, inactivation of bacteria, or the modeling of human immune system responses to pathogens rather than predicting disease events. As a result, we systematically reviewed 44 papers and the results are presented in this analysis.

biosecurity↗

DOE OSTI2012

Modeling Dynamic Regulatory Processes in Stroke.

The ability to examine in silico the behavior of biological systems can greatly accelerate the pace of discovery in disease pathologies, such as stroke, where in vivo experimentation is lengthy and costly. In this paper we describe an approach to in silico examination of blood genomic responses to neuroprotective agents and subsequent stroke through the development of dynamic models of the regulatory processes observed in the experimental gene expression data. First, we identified functional gene clusters from these data. Next, we derived ordinary differential equations (ODEs) relating regulators and functional clusters from the data. These ODEs were used to develop dynamic models that simulate the expression of regulated functional clusters using system dynamics as the modeling paradigm. The dynamic model has the considerable advantage of only requiring an initial starting state, and does not require measurement of regulatory influences at each time point in order to make accurate predictions. The manipulation of input model parameters, such as changing the magnitude of gene expression, made it possible to assess the behavior of the networks through time under varying conditions. We report that an optimized dynamic model can provide accurate predictions of overall system behavior under several different preconditioning paradigms.

dynamic modeling↗