Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Google PageRank to stem staph infections?

January 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Google PageRank to stem staph infections?

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Just as Silicon Valley insiders are calling for a qualified scuttling of Google's PageRank algorithm in sussing out Web page relevance, U.K. researchers are turning to Google's golden formula to combat the spread of treatment-resistent infections in hospitals.

According to a report in New Scientist, a Bradford University research group headed by Clive Beggs believes that PageRank could provide the key to understanding how superbugs, such as staph infections, are transmitted through the wards.

Viewing transmission routes -- by hand, through the air, or otherwise -- as what amount to "infectious networks," Beggs and associates are attempting to build a matrix similar to Google's page-relevancy tool to rank infection paths.

Simon Shepherd, a mathematician on board with the endeavor, believes that by observing normal daily activity in a hospital, a matrix of interactions among people and objects can be expressed and then analyzed to better understand where "nodes in the network" maximize the transmission of infections.

"Obviously nurses move among patients and that can spread infection, but they also touch light switches and lots of other surfaces too," Shepherd told New Scientist. "We sussed out in one ward that the chief node was a light switch. It could potentially distribute infection to the rest of the ward very quickly."

With such knowledge in hand, hospital administrators could then put policies in place or make alterations to hospital infrastructure to disrupt the infection network, targeting those nodes that the BugRank algorithm identifies as the most problematic.

Posted by Jason Snyder on January 4, 2008 04:42 PM

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