Related papers: In Search of Patient Zero: Visual Analytics of Pat…
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a serious threat to public health system. In order to be able to model the spread of this pathogens within healthcare system network, it is necessary to obtain information on patient movements and the…
Infectious diseases occur when pathogens from other individuals or animals infect a person, resulting in harm to both individuals and society as a whole. The outbreak of such diseases can pose a significant threat to human health. However,…
We study the problem of identifying the source of emerging large-scale outbreaks of foodborne disease. To solve the source identification problem we formulate a probabilistic model of the contamination diffusion process as a random walk on…
Hand-hygiene compliance and contacts of health-care workers largely determine the potential paths of pathogen transmission in hospital wards. We explored how the combination of data collected by two automated infrastructures based on…
Emergent antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are an increasingly significant source of morbidity and mortality. Antibiotic-resistant organisms have a natural reservoir in hospitals, and recent estimates suggest that almost 2 million…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…
Detection of patient-zero can give new insights to the epidemiologists about the nature of first transmissions into a population. In this paper, we study the statistical inference problem of detecting the source of epidemics from a snapshot…
Mathematical models in epidemiology are an indispensable tool to determine the dynamics and important characteristics of infectious diseases. Apart from their scientific merit, these models are often used to inform political decisions and…
The emergence of novel infectious agents presents challenges to statistical models of disease transmission. These challenges arise from limited, poor-quality data and an incomplete understanding of the agent. Moreover, outbreaks manifest…
One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff, patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such infections. We envision…
A hybrid network--deterministic model for simulation of multiresistant pathogen spread in a healthcare system is presented. The model accounts for two paths of pathogen transmission between the healthcare facilities: inter-hospital patient…
Rapid identification of outbreaks in hospitals is essential for controlling pathogens with epidemic potential. Although whole genome sequencing (WGS) remains the gold standard in outbreak investigations, its substantial costs and turnaround…
The current COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 100,000 victims and it will cause more deaths in the coming months. Tools that can track the number and locations of cases are critical for surveillance and can help in making…
Background: Animal trade plays an important role for the spread of infectious diseases in livestock populations. As a case study, we consider pig trade in Germany, where trade actors (agricultural premises) form a complex network. The…
The Bayesian analysis of infectious disease surveillance data from multiple locations typically involves building and fitting a spatio-temporal model of how the disease spreads in the structured population. Here we present new generally…
Hospital acquired infections are infections that occur in patients during hospitalization, which were not present at the time of admission. They are among the most common adverse events in healthcare around the world, leading to increased…
We study the patient zero problem in epidemic spreading processes in the independent cascade model and propose a geometric approach for source reconstruction. Using Johnson-Lindenstrauss projections, we embed the contact network into a…
A Belief Propagation approach has been recently proposed for the zero-patient problem in a SIR epidemics. The zero-patient problem consists in finding the initial source of an epidemic outbreak given observations at a later time. In this…
Developing safety policies to protect large groups of individuals working in indoor environments from disease spread is an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we investigate the scenario of workers becoming infected by a…
The epidemic spreading of a disease can be described by a contact network whose nodes are persons or centers of contagion and links heterogeneous relations among them. We provide a procedure to identify multiple sources of an outbreak or…