An Epic Tool for Force Readiness

Courtesy Photo | Proposed list of EpiGrid diseases and release schedule.  

FORT BELVOIR, VA, UNITED STATES

03.26.2019

Story by Nate McDonald 

Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Chemical and Biological Technologies Department

Nearly 200,000 American warfighters are based in more than 175 countries around the world, and each installation presents its own set of situational and operational requirements. A deliberate release or naturally occurring spread of infectious diseases poses a serious threat to warfighters and their operational effectiveness. Protecting them requires strong decision analysis and tools to support force readiness.

In an effort to answer medically relevant operational and planning questions, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (DTRA CB) introduced a new medical modeling portfolio to research and develop near real time modeling and simulation tools to aid medical planning, military decision support, and analysis of alternatives in support of layered defense against chemical and biological threat agents.

The computer modeling study was funded by DTRA CB and developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory.

EpiGrid was created to model the spread of infectious diseases with different modes of transmission, including contagious infectious diseases. In a real-world outbreak, there is a lack of timely data to build an accurate model to map disease progression. This tool allows military planners to simulate progression patterns and develop better ways to support decision making and analysis of alternatives to implement a layered defense in near real time.

The portfolio includes stochastic and deterministic computational tools and methods for modeling and simulating biological agent threats to produce operationally relevant outputs in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) areas of responsibility. These outputs will assist DoD decision makers in understanding the risks these threats pose and facilitate informed preparation and mitigation strategies and tactics.

EpiGrid categorizes populations into one of four compartments, with each compartment corresponding to a different disease state: susceptible, exposed, infected and recovered. The tool also accounts for the numbers of individuals that may be vaccinated, hospitalized, treated or deceased over the course of an outbreak. Groups of individuals within the population move between different compartments at varying rates, based on the force of infection, throughout the course of the outbreak. Thus, starting with an initial case of disease anywhere in the world, end users can model the numbers of casualties and fatalities resulting from this index case.

The EpiGrid tool is also user -driven and customizable; it allows users to model different medical (e.g., vaccination and/or treatment rates) and/or non-medical (e.g., social distancing) intervention strategies for a selected disease at varying time-points throughout an outbreak. Another unique feature is the capability for users to model the impacts of a disease outbreak in two distinct populations (e.g., military and civilian) simultaneously. These features will facilitate informed decision-making to plan, prepare and respond to biological threat agents of operational relevance to the warfighter.

EpiGrid will be parameterized against 30 infectious diseases over the course of 36 months (table1). The list consists of global biological threat agents with a high probability of weaponization, morbidity or mortality and was developed in collaboration with relevant DoD stakeholders.

Future expansions of the portfolio include the utility of medical models to simulate health and human effects of emerging biological threats. Additionally, DTRA CB is investigating modeling and simulation tools that would apply artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for monitoring and forecasting pathogens to provide timely, actionable medical information to the warfighter. These will further protect our troops and ensure force readiness around the world.

POC: Sweta Batni, Ph.D.: [e-mail]

• Date Taken: 03.26.2019
• Date Posted: 03.26.2019 09:33
• Story ID: 315665
• Location: FORT BELVOIR, VA, US