Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

A Review Of Risk Concepts And Models For Predicting The Risk Of Primary Stroke, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Predicting an individual's risk of primary stroke is an important tool that can help to lower the burden of stroke for both the individual and society. There are a number of risk models and risk scores in existence but no review or classification designed to help the reader better understand how models differ and the reasoning behind these differences. In this paper we review the existing literature on primary stroke risk prediction models. From our literature review we identify key similarities and differences in the existing models. We find that models can differ in a number of ways, including the …

An Odd-Protocol For Agent-Based Model For The Spread Of Covid-19 In Ireland, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Reports

No abstract provided.

Adapting An Agent-Based Model Of Infectious Disease Spread In An Irish County To Covid-19, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

The dynamics that lead to the spread of an infectious disease through a population can be characterized as a complex system. One way to model such a system, in order to improve preparedness, and learn more about how an infectious disease, such as COVID-19, might spread through a population, is agent-based epidemiological modelling. When a pandemic is caused by an emerging disease, it takes time to develop a completely new model that captures the complexity of the system. In this paper, we discuss adapting an existing agent-based model for the spread of measles in Ireland to simulate the spread of …

The Effects Of Differences In Vaccination Rates Across Socioeconomic Groups On The Size Of Measles Outbreaks, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Vaccination rates are often presented at the level of a country or region. However, within those areas there might be geographic or demographic pockets that have higher or lower vaccination rates. We use an agent-based model designed to simulate the spread of measles in Irish towns to examine if the effectiveness of vaccination rates to reduce disease at a population level is sensitive to the uniformity of vaccinations across socioeconomic groups. We find that when vaccinations are not applied evenly across socioeconomic groups we see more outbreaks and outbreaks with larger magnitudes.

Using A Hybrid Agent-Based And Equation Based Model To Test School Closure Policies During A Measles Outbreak, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Background

In order to be prepared for an infectious disease outbreak it is important to know what interventions will or will not have an impact on reducing the outbreak. While some interventions might have a greater effect in mitigating an outbreak, others might only have a minor effect but all interventions will have a cost in implementation. Estimating the effectiveness of an intervention can be done using computational modelling. In particular, comparing the results of model runs with an intervention in place to control runs where no interventions were used can help to determine what interventions will have the greatest …

A Hybrid Agent-Based And Equation Based Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Both agent-based models and equation-based models can be used to model the spread of an infectious disease. Equation-based models have been shown to capture the overall dynamics of a disease outbreak while agent-based models are able to capture heterogeneous characteristics of agents that drive the spread of an outbreak. However, agent-based models are computationally intensive. To capture the advantages of both the equation-based and agent-based models, we create a hybrid model where the disease component of the hybrid model switches between agent-based and equation-based. The switch is determined using the number of agents infected. We first test the model at …

A Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases In A Region, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

In understanding the dynamics of the spread of an infectious disease, it is important to understand how a town’s place in a network of towns within a region will impact how the disease spreads to that town and from that town. In this article, we take a model for the spread of an infectious disease in a single town and scale it up to simulate a region containing multiple towns. The model is validated by looking at how adding additional towns and commuters influences the outbreak in a single town. We then look at how the centrality of a town …