Modeling of Whole Genomic Sequencing Implementation using System Dynamics and Game Theory

Biomarker testing is a laboratory test in oncology that is used in the selection of targeted cancer treatments and helping to avoid ineffective treatments. There exist several types of biomarker tests that can be used to detect the presence of particular mutations or variation in gene expression. Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) is a biomarker test for analyzing the entire genome. WGS can provide more comprehensive diagnostic information, but it is also more expensive than other tests. In this study, System Dynamics and Game Theoretic models are employed to evaluate scenarios, and facilitate organizational decision making regarding WGS implementation. These models evaluate the clinical and economic value of WGS as well as its affordability and accessibility. The evaluated scenarios have covered the timing of implementing WGS using time to diagnosis and total cost.Comment: The IISE Annual Conference & Expo 202

Spatial competitive games with disingenuously delayed positions

Citation: Soltanolkottabi, M., Ben-Arieh, D., & Wu, C.H. (2017). Spatial competitive games with disingenuously delayed positions. Manuscript, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.During the last decade, spatial games have received great attention from researchers showing the behavior of populations of players over time in a spatial structure. One of the main factors which can greatly affect the destiny of such populations is the updating scheme used to apprise new strategies of players. Synchronous updating is the most common updating strategy in which all players update their strategy at the same time. In order to be able to describe the behavior of populations more realistically several asynchronous updating schemes have been proposed. Asynchronous game does not use a universal and players can update their strategy at different time steps during the play. In this paper, we introduce a new type of asynchronous strategy updating in which some of the players hide their updated strategy from their neighbors for several time steps. It is shown that this behavior can change the behavior of populations but does not necessarily lead to a higher payoff for the dishonest players. The paper also shows that with dishonest players, the average payoff of players is less than what they think they get, while they are not aware of their neighbors’ true strategy

Modeling social response to disease spread using spatial game theory

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems EngineeringDavid Ben-AriehEpidemic disease outbreaks are among the major threats to the sustenance and health of human societies. Many reports in public health show that even with the current state of prevention and treatment technologies, epidemic diseases still cause severe health issues and loss of life, and hence remain a source of large public health cost on societies. Consequently, controlling the spread of infectious diseases has become a main area of focus for public health policy makers. Modeling the dynamics of epidemic disease outbreaks and the corresponding social response is one of the techniques that can help public health policy makers to better design and evaluate relevant policies with more precise and detailed knowledge of such dynamics in social interactions and self-organization. Accordingly, we propose a modeling approach based on spatial game theory using public goods game, which is a prominent approach for capturing the behavior of individuals in response to local stimuli. The settings of public goods game enable this method to model the dilemma of not vaccinating and not paying the related costs of vaccination or vaccinating to provide a healthy living environment for the individual and other members of the community. This is the first time that a public goods game payoff function is used in modeling and capturing the behavior of populations in response to epidemics. In this dissertation, two variants of the proposed model are introduced. The first captures the behavior of individuals in response to an epidemic, in which decision making is on whether to vaccinate or not. The second model aims to capture the behavior of interacting populations to an epidemic, and the decision is on how much to change the level of vaccination in each population. Also, the impact of considering the time-delay between infection and emergence of symptoms of the disease is studied. These models demonstrate that the adoption of public goods game based payoff function in the modeling of epidemics can capture the vaccination behavior of individuals, and can lead to a better control of the epidemic spread in the population level. Moreover, this dissertation proposes two new strategy updating methods in spatial evolutionary games, which are shown to be capable of modeling the dynamics of decision making under different sensitivities to vaccination and fear of infection

Game Theoretic Modeling of Infectious Disease Transmission with Delayed Emergence of Symptoms

Modeling the spread of infectious diseases and social responses is one method that can help public health policy makers improve the control of epidemic outbreaks and make better decisions about vaccination costs, the number of mandatory vaccinations, or investment in media efforts to inform the public of disease threats. Incubation period—the period when an individual has been exposed to a disease and could be infectious but is not yet aware of it—is one factor that can affect an epidemic outbreak, and considering it when modeling outbreaks can improve model accuracy. A change in outbreak activity can occur from the time a person becomes infected until they become aware of infection when they can transmit the disease but their social group considers them a susceptible individual and not an infectious one. This study evaluates the effect of this delay between the time of infection of an individual and the time of diagnosis of the infection (incubation period) in an epidemic outbreak. This study investigates the social dynamics of vaccination and transmission in such epidemic outbreaks, using a model of the public goods game