Elizabeth Hunter

Technological University Dublin - City Campus | TU Dublin

While age is an important risk factor, there are some disadvantages to including it in a stroke risk model: age can dominate the risk score and lead to over- or under-predictions in some age groups. There is evidence to suggest that some of these disadvantages are due to the non-proportionality of other risk factors with age, e.g., risk factors con...

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 differen...

Agent-based models can be used to better understand the impacts of lifting restrictions or implementing interventions during a pandemic. However, agent-based models are computationally expensive, and running a model of a large population can result in a simulation taking too long to run for the model to be a useful analysis tool during a public hea...

Equation-based and agent-based models are popular methods in understanding disease dynamics. Although there are many types of equation-based models, the most common is the SIR compartmental model that assumes homogeneous mixing and populations. One way to understand the effects of these assumptions is by agentization. Equation-based models can be a...

COVID-19 has caused tremendous strain on healthcare systems worldwide. At the same time, concern within the population over this strain and the chances of becoming infected has potentially reduced the likelihood of people seeking medical treatment for other health events. Stroke is a medical emergency and swift treatment can make a large difference...

One of the more interesting ideas for achieving personalized, preventive, and participatory medicine is the concept of a digital twin. A digital twin is a personalized computer model of a patient. So far, digital twins have been constructed using either mechanistic models, which can simulate the trajectory of physiological and biochemical processes...

Age is one of the most important risk factors when it comes to stroke risk prediction. However, including age as a risk factor in a stroke prediction model can give rise to a number of difficulties. Age often dominates the risk score, and also not all risk factors contribute proportionally to stroke risk by age. In this study we investigate a numbe...

COVID-19 has caused strain on healthcare systems worldwide and concern within the population over this strain and the chances of becoming infected has reduced the likelihood of people seeking medical treatment for other health events. Stroke is a medical emergency and swift treatment can make a difference in outcomes. Understanding how concern over...

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...

Unknown onset time is a common contraindication for anti-thrombolytic treatment of ischaemic stroke.T2 relaxation-based signal changes within the lesion can identify patients within or beyond the 4.5-hour intravenous thrombolysis treatment-window. However, now that intra-arterial thrombolysis is recommended between 4.5 and 6 hours from symptom onse...

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. Est...

Although important risk factors have been identified for stroke, current risk scores often underestimate risk for specific groups particularly younger age groups. Determining risk factors that might contribute more to the risk of a specific age group might help reduce this underestimation. We use data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging to c...

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 regi...

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. Est...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0208775.].

Agent-based models are a tool that can be used to better understand the dynamics of an infectious disease outbreak. An infectious disease outbreak is influenced by many factors including vaccination or immunity levels, population density, and the age structure of the population. We hypothesize that these factors along with interactions of factors a...

State variables for agents in the model. (XLSX)

Image of the model environment for Schull, Ireland. The white boarders are the boarders of the small areas that make up the town. (TIF)

State variables for grid cells in the model. (XLSX)

Socioeconomic status can have an important effect on health. In this paper we: (i) propose using house price data as a publicly available proxy for socioeconomic status to examine neighbourhood socioeconomic status at a more fine grained resolution than is available in Irish Central Statistics Office data; (ii) use a dissimilarity index to demonstr...

Agent-based simulation modelling has been used in many epidemiological studies on infectious diseases. However, because agent based modelling is a field without any clear protocol for developing simulations the researcher is given a high amount of flexibility. This flexibility has led to many different forms of agent-based epidemiological simulatio...

The Affordable Care Act provides for a program of risk adjustment in the individual and small group health insurance markets in 2014 as Marketplaces are implemented and new market reforms take effect. The purpose of risk adjustment is to lessen or eliminate the influence of risk selection on the premiums that plans charge. The risk adjustment metho...