john nelson huffman mentor: dr. nina h. fefferman
Post on 22-Dec-2015
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John Nelson HuffmanMentor: Dr. Nina H. Fefferman
BiosurveillanceThe science of determining when unusual
patterns of disease arise in a populationWhy is biosurveillance important?Earlier responses mean lower mortality rates
Inherent problems with infection dataNatural fluctuation of what constitutes
endemic conditionsMethod of DiagnosisNon-uniform reporting
Problems with current methodologyEpidemic conditions are defined statically by
examining historical precedentMany critical outbreaks involve either new
diseases or diseases affecting new populations for which historical data is inadequate
ApproachThe surveillance network will be modeled as
a dynamically connected graphEach node will represent a disease incidence
monitoring station (i.e. hospitals, doctor’s offices, etc.) and will possess multidimensional data about the respective populations they represent
Nodes will be able to share data with other nodes located in a ‘sphere of proximity’ as defined by a specific algorithm
Biologically Inspired Algorithms
F igure 4 – Serra tia m a rcescens, bacteria
know n to exh ibit cell- to- cell com m un ication to m on ito r their popu lation d en sity, synchron ize
their behavior, and in teract socially. (rep rod u ced from <w ww.m icro bio logybytes.com / blog/ 20 0 7/ 0 6 / ).
F igure 3 - L eaf cu tter ants return ing along the forage path to the co lony w ith their fi nd ings ( left) and an ant trail lead ing from the co lony to a nearby area w ith appropriate leaves for foraging ( righ t) ( reproduced from <latinam ericayourw ay.blogspot.com / >) .
F igure 2 - H oney bee fo rager gathering po llen ( left) and com m unicating the quality o f the d iscovered site to others back at the h ive ( righ t)
Bacteria Quorum SensingQuorum: the minimum number of members
required to achieve a consensusChemical signals from individual bacterium
are used by their 'most immediate neighbors' Bacteria can determine the density of their
neighbors and act accordingly based upon which chemical signals are propagated by a quorum
Adaptation of AlgorithmsIndividual organisms are analogous to our
monitoring stations (i.e. nodes)“Traveling to a specific location” will
represent a node’s decision to share its information/decisions with its ‘sphere of proximity’
Frequency of communication and relative weight among all nodes in the network will be interpreted as “excitement,” an attribute of the nodes which represents their population's potential for an outbreak compared to other nodes in the network