{"278191":{"#nid":"278191","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Georgia Tech Professor Chairs AAAS Panel on Pandemic Emergency Response","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWhen a pandemic spreads, health officials must quickly formulate a strategy to limit infections and deaths. That requires sifting through massive amounts of data in a short amount of time and organizing medical personnel who may have little information on the pandemic.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETo help coordinate a rapid response to pandemics, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has designed software that combines biological data on the pandemic with demographic data of the at-risk population so that health officials can develop a game plan to limit the pandemic\u2019s spread. The software also combs social media sites for real-time information on the pandemic and activities of the population.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EEva Lee, director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, talked about her emergency response software at the 2014 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWe have developed a real-time system that will gather the demographics of the region that is being affected, and also pick up on-the-ground-data about who is available and doing what, and about movement of the affected population,\u201d Lee said. \u201cOur work is the first to take demographic information and real-time population behavior and interlace it with the biological information to come up with a decision that health officials can actually use.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ELee chaired the panel titled \u201cEmergency Response and Community Resilience via Engineering and Computational Advances.\u201d\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ELee shared her experience helping federal officials respond to the H1N1 flu in 2009, as well as her experience planning an emergency response to a potential anthrax outbreak. Lee was also involved in coordinating a response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the decontamination and health screening effort in Japan after the 2011 Fukushima radiological disaster. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOther speakers on the panel include Ronald Eguchi of ImageCat Inc. in Long Beach, Calif, who talked about inventory data capture tools to assess risk from natural disasters. Yasuaki Sakamoto, of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., spoke about improving social media for disaster response.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EEmergency responders to a pandemic must quickly gather information on the biological agent to assess the characteristics of the pandemic and decide which treatment would be most effective. They also collect data on the risk factors of the individuals in the pandemic, such as the severity of patient\u2019s sickness, and if children or pregnant women are infected. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThe big challenge in a pandemic is how do you use all of this information to determine the best strategy that will give you the minimum number of total infections and mortality rate,\u201d Lee said. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EInformation from Lee\u2019s systems approach allows health official to determine where to allocate medical resources and personnel in the best way so that operations will be most successful. Through the software developed in her lab at Georgia Tech, officials can determine, for example, how much vaccine to give at-risk populations and how much to give to the general populations to limit the spread of infection and mortality. Officials can also map where to set up medical sites to avoid traffic gridlock and worsening the pandemic as infected patients converge on treatment sites.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWe can do a real-time optimization to tell you exactly what are the sites that you should set up and who should be going where,\u201d Lee said.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EResearch News\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EGeorgia Institute of Technology\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E177 North Avenue\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EAtlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/twitter.com\/GTResearchNews\u0022\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E@GTResearchNews\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMedia Relations Contacts:\u003C\/strong\u003E Brett Israel (\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/twitter.com\/btiatl\u0022\u003E@btiatl\u003C\/a\u003E) (404-385-1933) (\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ebrett.israel@comm.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jtoon@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejtoon@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EWriter:\u003C\/strong\u003E Brett Israel\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ETo help coordinate a rapid response to pandemics, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has designed software that combines biological data on the pandemic with demographic data of the at-risk population so that health officials can develop a game plan to limit the pandemic\u0027s spread. The software also combs social media sites for real-time information on the pandemic and activities of the population.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"A professor at Georgia Tech has designed software that combines biological data on the pandemic with demographic data of the at-risk population so that health officials can develop a game plan to limit the pandemic\u2019s spread."}],"uid":"27902","created_gmt":"2014-02-21 15:52:28","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:15:55","author":"Brett Israel","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2014-02-21T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2014-02-21T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"278171":{"id":"278171","type":"image","title":"Eva K. Lee","body":null,"created":"1449244168","gmt_created":"2015-12-04 15:49:28","changed":"1475894971","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:49:31","alt":"Eva K. Lee","file":{"fid":"198837","name":"eva-lee-profile.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/eva-lee-profile_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/eva-lee-profile_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":97207,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/eva-lee-profile_0.jpg?itok=FMHhbMft"}}},"media_ids":["278171"],"groups":[{"id":"1188","name":"Research Horizons"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"1629","name":"AAAS"},{"id":"1043","name":"eva lee"},{"id":"729","name":"pandemic"},{"id":"167642","name":"systems engineering"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"39441","name":"Bioengineering and Bioscience"},{"id":"39541","name":"Systems"}],"news_room_topics":[{"id":"71891","name":"Health and Medicine"}],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EBrett Israel\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E404-385-1933\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ebrett.israel@comm.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/twitter.com\/btiatl\u0022\u003E@btiatl\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}