Ray Casting for Infectious Transmission Hotspot Identification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) pose a significant challenge due to the difficulty in tracking and preventing airborne and droplet-mediated transmission, which can lead to increased medical costs and patient illnesses or deaths, especially since the latency time between transmission and symptom onset complicates the determination of infectious pathways.
Innovation Solution
A computer-based system that uses ray casting to distribute origin points over a medical facility floor map, casting rays to encounter physical barriers, and generating an infectious transmission probability map, allowing for the identification of hotspots and optimizing patient routing and cleaning schedules.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If manual tracking methods are used to identify transmission vectors, then resource consumption is high and tracking accuracy is limited, but automated computational methods provide high efficiency and precision
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces manual mechanical tracking methods with automated computational ray casting algorithms. The system uses computer processors to cast rays through 3D hospital environment models, automatically identifying transmission pathways and hotspots without human intervention, thereby achieving high computational efficiency while managing system complexity through software-based solutions.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a digital copy or virtual model of the hospital environment including floors, walls, doors, and furniture. This 3D computational model serves as a simplified representation that can be processed efficiently by computers, allowing the ray casting algorithm to simulate transmission pathways without requiring complex real-world measurements and analyses.
2Measurement precision
If comprehensive tracking of all potential transmission pathways is performed, then identification accuracy improves, but computational resources and time consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the hospital environment into discrete 3D spatial elements (floors, walls, doors, furniture) and divides the transmission analysis into multiple ray casting operations from different origin points. This segmentation allows the computational task to be distributed and processed efficiently, maintaining high identification accuracy by examining all pathways while reducing overall computation time through parallel processing capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent employs ray casting algorithms that cast numerous rays beyond what might be strictly necessary, exploring all potential transmission pathways including those that may not be actual infection routes. This excessive action ensures comprehensive coverage and high identification accuracy, while the computational efficiency of the algorithm keeps the time cost manageable by quickly eliminating improbable pathways.
3Measurement precision
If physical barriers are accounted for in transmission modeling, then transmission probability accuracy improves, but computational complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a digital 3D model as an intermediary representation of physical barriers (walls, doors, furniture). Instead of directly analyzing complex real-world barrier interactions, the system processes these barriers as simplified geometric objects in the computational model, maintaining accurate transmission probability calculations while reducing modeling complexity through this intermediate digital representation.
Data Source
AI summary
In an epidemiology transmission probability analysis for a medical facility, ray origin points are distributed over a medical facility floor map. Rays are cast from the ray origin points. The cast rays stop upon encountering a physical barrier mapped in the medical facility floor map. An infectious transmission probability map is computed from intersections of the cast rays. At least a portion of the medical facility floor map is displayed on a display, overlaid with the infectious transmission probability map. The distributing, the casting, and the computing are suitably performed by one or more electronic processors.