In the last months of 2019, Majid Bani Yaghoub, Ph.D., planned his mathematics curriculum to study a new virus that was beginning to spread in China. He knew mathematical modeling and analysis based on a real-world situation would be a good fit with his students in Graduate Differential Equations.
Even then, before COVID-19 became a common topic of global study, Bani’ s students were using optimal control theory to predict the best way to minimize spread. Bani is furthering his work through interdisciplinary research to develop and implement mathematical and computational models to optimize control and prevention of infection in healthcare settings.
Bani has assembled researchers from the UMKC Division of Computing, Analytics and Mathematics; the UMKC Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics; the UMKC School of Medicine; University Health; the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department; and the University of California-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to form the Midwest Virtual Laboratory of Pathogen Transmission in Healthcare Settings (MVL-PATHS), an interdisciplinary research collaborative.
The Center for Disease Control awarded MVL-PATHS a three year $879,162 grant to develop a new generation of mathematical and computational models of infectious diseases. The team will use the One Health modeling approach, which incorporates interconnections between people, animals, plants and their shared environment.
Bani believes the One Health approach – a process that recognizes the health interconnections among people, animals, plants and their shared environment – is crucial to identify risk factors for transmission of healthcare-associated infections.
The research team will be working with healthcare providers to record their movements, how much time they spend with patients and other factors in order to collect data that will make models more accurate than the current models.
“We’re not interested in watching individuals,” he says. “The models will identify high-risk movement patterns and hotspots at a hospital so that we can have better control of asymptomatic spread of infection.”
The research could foster a healthier general population, but the team is paying special attention to vulnerable populations.
“Already, the research shows that people who are working in nursing homes may work at multiple locations, so it’s possible they are taking infections from one nursing home to another. This is not about laying blame. The research can help us discover ways that we can improve the situation.”
The interdisciplinary team is critical to the research success.
“This is a great start for the UMKC School of Science and Engineering and a direct result of the university’s restructuring through UMKC Forward,” Bani said. “The COVID-19 pandemic taught us many lessons, and one of the key lessons was that math models are useful, though they are far from perfect. There is a need to create a new generation of math models, computational models and tools that can become more accurate, more reliable.”
But the work goes beyond research of what has already occurred.
“The essence of this project is to develop a virtual laboratory for simulation of disease spread, and at the same time train PhDs who can implement the virtual laboratory in health institutes, and work with the Center for Disease Control and health departments,” Bani said.
“There were many things that we could have done to lessen the impact of COVID-19. The key now is to learn from that experience and use the One Health modeling approach rather than looking at an individual farm or hospital. We must recognize that the world is fully connected, and we need to look at these problems as one big picture and see how these different units and communities can work together.”