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The Sir Models, Their Applications, And Approximations Of Their Rates, Christopher Cano

Mathematics Senior Capstone Papers

The SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) models are used to help predict the spread of diseases. The goals of this paper are: elaborating on the methods of approximating the recovery rate, infection rate, and loss of immunity rate, comparing the SIR models with these approximation methods to real world data, and determining the most accurate combination of the approximation methods for each SIR model. There are several SIR models such as the Kermack-McKendrick, SIRS, and SI models that are designed for specific diseases. Understanding the parameters of these models will assist us in maximizing their accuracy. For example, there is no explicit formula …

The T, T*, Vi, Vni Model For Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (Hiv-1) Dynamics, Amy Creel

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this research project, I investigated deterministic and stochastic versions of a model for Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) dynamics. First, an analytical solution to a simplified version of the deterministic model is found. Then, numerical techniques are used to obtain an approximate solution to the deterministic model. Finally, a stochastic version of the model is discussed, and numerical methods are used to find an approximate solution to the stochastic system. These results demonstrate the behavior of HIV-1 in an infected patient under the effects of reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors, and illustrate how the addition of randomness to …

The Impact Of Extreme Heat On Environmental Justice Communities In California: Assessing Equity In Climate Action Plans, Karishma S. Becha

Master's Projects and Capstones

Climate change projections suggest extreme heat events will be more frequent over the next few decades. Extreme heat has both negative environmental and social impacts as it affects energy security, public health by increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses and stresses food and crop supply through prolonged droughts. The impacts of extreme heat will also disproportionately affect communities of low economic status. Because of this, there is a need for better climate action plans that can adapt to and mitigate the impacts brought upon by extreme heat that does not disproportionately impact vulnerable communities. This research analyzed local government Climate …

Control Of Secondary Extinctions In Stochastic Food Webs, Dunia M. Fernandez

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Studies on both model-based and empirical food webs have shown that per- turbations to an ecological community can cause a species to go extinct, often resulting in the loss of additional species in a cascade of secondary extinctions. These eects can seriously debilitate a food web and threaten the existence of an ecosystem. Here, we consider niche model-based food webs with internal noise and investigate the eects of a control on a secondary extinction cas- cade triggered by a noise-induced extinction. We show that the forced removal of a nonbasal species immediately after a primary extinction can extend the mean …

Impact Of Domestic Animals On Prevalence Of Vector-Borne Diseases In Humans, Md Mondal Hasan Zahid

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

Vector-borne infectious diseases are one of the leading problems for public health worldwide, particularly in underdeveloped and developing countries. These diseases infect humans through the bite of infected vectors. The effect of host diversity on disease persistence, well studied in ecological literature, is examined here in a domestic setting. Some additional hosts dilute infection, while others amplify certain disease infections. Domestic animals can play an important role, as an additional host, in the disease dynamics by affecting host-pathogen interactions. However, the effect of additional hosts is not always straightforward since their presence impacts negatively by helping the vector population grow …

Stochastic Modeling Of Zoonotic Disease, Sausan Odatalla

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

We provide an overview of the mathematical modeling of deterministic and stochastic infectious disease models. These models enable one to understand the outbreak, spread, and extinction of disease. We then focus on stochastic models with a disease reservoir to understand outbreak vulnerability for zoonotic diseases such as Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). Numerical results from a more complicated EVD model are compared with the theoretical results of a simplified stochastic SISk model. We also demonstrate the effect that vaccine has on outbreak vulnerability in a population that is connected to a disease reservoir.

Detection And Enumeration Of Bacterial Pathogens In The American Oyster (Crassostrea Virginica), Mohammad Maruf Billah

Theses and Dissertations

American oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is a popular seafood for its delicacy and high nutritional value. Based on increasing concern about contamination of bacterial pathogens in raw oyster, my research objectives have been focused on detection and enumeration of two important bacterial pathogens, Escherichia coli and Salmonella spp. in the American oyster in south Texas waters, local markets and controlled laboratory studies. Immunohistochemical and RT-PCR analyses showed substantial bacterial pathogen’s presence in gills and digestive glands of oysters collected from San Martin Lake and South Padre Island as well as local markets. Laboratory studies showed increasing trend of both …

Characterization Of Microbial Communities Across Disease States And Environmental Conditions In Kemp’S Ridley (Lepidochelys Kempii) And Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia Mydas), Kerry L. Mcnally

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

All species of sea turtles are threatened or endangered, with various diseases and conditions affecting populations around the world. Understanding healthy populations as well as populations beset by disease conditions, such as fibropapillomatosis and cold-stunning, could lead to helpful tools in the conservation management and medical treatment needed to protect these species. Microbial communities, or the microbiome, at different body sites of sea turtles likely play important roles in the health of these animals, from aiding in digestion to immune system regulation. Disruption of these communities, either through disease and/or environmental factors, may play a role in disease processes and …

Who And When To Screen: Multi-Round Active Screening For Network Recurrent Infectious Diseases Under Uncertainty, Han-Ching Ou, Arunesh Sinha, Sze-Chuan Suen, Andrew Perrault, Alpan Raval, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Controlling recurrent infectious diseases is a vital yet complicated problem in global health. During the long period of time from patients becoming infected to finally seeking treatment, their close contacts are exposed and vulnerable to the disease they carry. Active screening (or case finding) methods seek to actively discover undiagnosed cases by screening contacts of known infected people to reduce the spread of the disease. Existing practice of active screening methods often screen all contacts of an infected person, requiring a large budget. In cooperation with a research institute in India, we develop a model of the active screening problem …

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 …

Doubling Time Of The Covid-19 Epidemic By Province, China, Kamalich Muniz-Rodriguez, Gerardo Chowell, Chi-Hin Cheung, Dongyu Jia, Po-Ying Lai, Yiseul Lee, Manyun Liu, Sylvia Ofori, Kimberlyn M. Roosa, Lone Simonsen, Cecile Viboud, Isaac Fung

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

In China, the doubling time of the coronavirus disease epidemic by province increased during January 20–February 9, 2020. Doubling time estimates ranged from 1.4 (95% CI 1.2–2.0) days for Hunan Province to 3.1 (95% CI 2.1–4.8) days for Xinjiang Province. The estimate for Hubei Province was 2.5 (95% CI 2.4–2.6) days.

Estimating Population Immunity Without Serological Testing, Andrew Lesniewski

Publications and Research

We propose an approximate methodology for estimating the overall level of immunity against COVID-19 in a population that has been affected by the recent epidemic. The methodology relies on the currently available mortality data and utilizes the properties of the SIR model. We illustrate the application of the method by estimating the recent levels of immunity in 10 US states with highest case numbers of COVID-19.

484— Modeling Social Distancing Methods And Their Effectiveness In Combating The Spread Of Ebola, Rachel Fair

GREAT Day Posters

Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare but severe disease that is transmitted among humans through direct-contact with, and close proximity to, infected bodily fluids. From 2014-16, West Africa experienced the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, infecting over 28,000 people, and killing over 11,000. Although the symptoms of EVD are treatable, the disease can be extremely deadly, with an average of 50% EVD cases resulting in fatality. In areas where healthcare is scarce and vaccinations are not readily available, the practices of social distancing and self-quarantining have been shown to be highly effective in combating the spread of EVD. To …

465— Modeling Vaccine Efficacy For Tuberculosis In A Prison Population, Kaitlyn Mundackal

GREAT Day Posters

Tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease and is particularly problematic in confined communities such as prisons. I simulated how Tuberculosis moves through a prison population and tested how much vaccination effort is needed to control its spread. To explore this, I tested adding ever increasing numbers of randomly placed edges in a network and determined the size of the largest component. Afterwards, I removed edges in the model using two different methods, one illustrating if the edges were removed randomly and the other starting with prisoners that had the most connections, to simulate the effect of vaccination. My results show …

A Study Of Cholera Transmission, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar

Open Educational Resources

A recent cholera outbreak in Haiti brought public attention to this disease. Cholera, a diarrheal disease, is caused by an intestinal bacterium, and if not addressed in a timely manner may become fatal. During the project described here, the students will learn how to solve and address a practical problem such as cholera transmission using various mathematical tools. Students will learn to develop a differential equation model based on practical scenarios, analyze the model using mathematics as well as numerical simulation, and finally describe the results in words that are understandable by the people who are not specialists in this …

Finding Trends In Big City Health Issues With Data Visualization, Shridhar Kulkarni

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, data visualization has become one of the most effective tools to understand and identify unseen features of the large datasets available. An open source data set available for health issues for big cities across the United States was obtained. There are numerous indicators presented in the dataset including Demographics, Chronic Health Diseases, Social and Economic Factors, Food Safety, Mortality Rates, Cancer and Life Expectancy Rates. The dataset encompassed myriad of demographics as well as specific data for a number of US cities. The data was explored in different methods in Data points in terms of the demographic …

Full Issue 49(1)

International Journal of Speleology

No abstract provided.

Context Aware Data Generation Through Domain Specific Language, Caleb Druckemiller

Other Student Works

No abstract provided.

Auspicious Symbols Of Rank And Status, Byron Breedlove, Isaac Fung

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Work published in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Modeling The Effects Of Passive Immunity In Birds For The Disease Dynamics Of West Nile Virus, Noelle West, Vinodh K. Chellamuthu

Spora: A Journal of Biomathematics

West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne virus that circulates among birds but also affects humans. Migrating birds carry these viruses from one place to another each year. WNV has spread rapidly across the continental United States resulting in numerous human infections and deaths. Several studies suggest that larval mosquito control measures should be taken as early as possible in a season to control the mosquito population size. Also, adult mosquito control measures are necessary to prevent the transmission of WNV from mosquitoes to birds and humans. To better understand the effective strategy for controlling affected larvae mosquito population, we …

Impact Of Meteorological Factors On The Covid-19 Transmission: A Multicity Study In China, Jiangtao Liu, Ji Zhou, Jinxi Yao, Xiuxia Zhang, Lanyu Li, Xiaocheng Xu, Xiaotao He, Bo Wang, Shihua Fu, Tingting Niu, Jun Yan, Yanjun Shi, Xiaowei Ren, Jingping Niu, Weihao Zhu, Sheng Li, Bin Luo, Kai Zhang

Publications and Research

The purpose of the present study is to explore the associations between novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) case counts and meteorological factors in 30 provincial capital cities of China. We compiled a daily dataset including confirmed case counts, ambient temperature (AT), diurnal temperature range (DTR), absolute humidity (AH) and migration scale index (MSI) for each city during the period of January 20th to March 2nd, 2020. First, we explored the associations between COVID-19 confirmed case counts, meteorological factors, and MSI using non-linear regression. Then, we conducted a two-stage analysis for 17 cities with more than 50 confirmed cases. In …

Tin @ Tio2 Core–Shell Nanoparticles As Plasmon-Enhanced Photosensitizers: The Role Of Hot Electron Injection, Xiaohui Xu, Aveek Dutta, Jacob Khurgin, Alexander Wei, Vladimir M. Shalaev, Alexandra Boltasseva

Department of Chemistry Faculty Publications

Metal–semiconductor heterostructures have attracted a lot of attention due to their ability to enhance photovoltaic and photocatalytic processes via plasmonic effects. Thus far, most of the proposed heterostructures are designed with noble metals and the potential of alternative plasmonic materials, such as titanium nitride (TiN), is not yet well explored. In this work, TiN@TiO2 core–shell nanoparticles (NPs) are synthesized and proposed as plasmon-enhanced photosensitizers for efficient singlet oxygen generation, with the focus on the role of hot electron injection. Excitation of dilute TiN@TiO2 NP dispersions by a 700 nm femtosecond-pulsed laser effectively converts ground-state oxygen into singlet oxygen (1O2), driven …

A Data Scientist Looks At Covid-19 Part I: Local And National Statistics, Anthony Breitzman

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

No abstract provided.

Information Mining For Covid-19 Research From A Large Volume Of Scientific Literature, Sabber Ahamed, Manar D. Samad

Computer Science Faculty Research

The year 2020 has seen an unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic due to the outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus in 180 countries. In a desperate effort to discover new drugs and vaccines for COVID-19, many scientists are working around the clock. Their valuable time and effort may benefit from computer-based mining of a large volume of health science literature that is a treasure trove of information. In this paper, we have developed a graph-based model using abstracts of 10,683 scientific articles to find key information on three topics: transmission, drug types, and genome research related to coronavirus. A subgraph is …

Limited Early Warnings And Public Attention To Coronavirus Disease 2019 In China, January–February, 2020: A Longitudinal Cohort Of Randomly Sampled Weibo Users, Yuner Zhu, King-Wa Fu, Karen A. Grépin, Hai Liang, Isaac Fung

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Objective:

Awareness and attentiveness have implications for the acceptance and adoption of disease prevention and control measures. Social media posts provide a record of the public’s attention to an outbreak. To measure the attention of Chinese netizens to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pre-established nationally representative cohort of Weibo users was searched for COVID-19-related key words in their posts.

Methods:

COVID-19-related posts (N = 1101) were retrieved from a longitudinal cohort of 52 268 randomly sampled Weibo accounts (December 31, 2019–February 12, 2020).

Results:

Attention to COVID-19 was limited prior to China openly acknowledging human-to-human transmission on …

Monarch Science Observer, Volume 3, College Of Sciences, Old Dominion University

College of Sciences Newsletter

April-Spring 2020, issue of Monarch Science Observer, ODU Colleges of Sciences Newsletter.

Mercury And Other Trace Metal Analysis In Bat Guano, Amanda Lee Houchens

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Heavy metal pollution in the environment pose risks to ecosystems and the populations that reside in them. Mercury, lead, and cadmium negatively impact humans by way of neurological disorders, various cancers, and damage the reproductive organs, kidneys, and lungs. Bats have been studied as a bioindicator species to identify possibly elevated levels of these metals in the environment. Previous studies have identified correlation between metal concentrations within bat tissues and fur. Many bat species are endangered or at risk due to white-nose syndrome so collection of tissues and fur for analysis can impose stress on bat colonies. This study investigates …

Developing Agent-Based Models To Study Financial Markets, Saurav Chakraborty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents research that employs agent-based modelling to provide a framework to support simulation as a complement to traditional economic models for policy evaluation. It consists of three studies. The first study employs cluster analysis to capture the different types of banks and the associated business models that define their decision-making. The results from study one will help us get an understanding of how different banks behave and provide an insight into their lending practices. Hence, it would be very helpful in evaluating and analyzing the impact of future policies. Study two develops a fine-grained interbank lending model based …

Group Testing Identification: Objective Functions, Implementation, And Multiplex Assays, Brianna D. Hitt

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Group testing is the process of combining items into groups to test for a binary characteristic. One of its most widely used applications is infectious disease testing. In this context, specimens (e.g., blood, urine) are amalgamated into groups and tested. For groups that test positive, there are many algorithmic retesting procedures available to identify positive individuals. The appeal of group testing is that the overall number of tests needed is significantly less than for individual testing when disease prevalence is small and an appropriate algorithm is chosen. Group testing has a number of applications beyond infectious disease testing, such as …

On The Robustness Of Cascade Diffusion Under Node Attacks, Alvis Logins, Yuchen Li, Panagiotis Karras

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How can we assess a network's ability to maintain its functionality under attacks? Network robustness has been studied extensively in the case of deterministic networks. However, applications such as online information diffusion and the behavior of networked public raise a question of robustness in probabilistic networks. We propose three novel robustness measures for networks hosting a diffusion under the Independent Cascade (IC) model, susceptible to node attacks. The outcome of such a process depends on the selection of its initiators, or seeds, by the seeder, as well as on two factors outside the seeder's discretion: the attack strategy and the …