Google-Style Search Could Track Spread of Hospital Infections

January 24, 2008

Improved knowledge of infection routes might lessen the rate of transmission of hospital-acquired infections, such as those caused by superbug MRSA. Such information could be obtained by emulating the method that Google uses to rank search results, says British mathematician Simon Shepherd of Bradford University.

Researchers have already done studies and taken samples to discover how doctors' neckties, for instance, harbor bacteria. However, little is known about the routes by which microbes spread to patients and staff or propagate within hospital environments.

Google's PageRank algorithm could help by ranking the routes of infection. "The hand-borne route is the major route,” Shepherd told New Scientist. “But there are others, and we need to know what they are."

Copying the way Google searches the web could help identify these additional routes. "When [Google's] spiders crawl the web," Shepherd said, "they build up a connectivity matrix of links between pages."

Shepherd proposes building a sample matrix describing all interactions between people and objects in a hospital ward, based on daily observations.

"Obviously nurses move among patients and that can spread infection, but they also touch light switches and lots of other surfaces," he noted. "If you observe a network of all those interactions you can build a matrix of which nodes in the network are in contact with which other nodes."

The goal, Shepherd said, is to “produce a software tool so managers of wards can carry out the analysis for themselves."

Shepherd presented preliminary results of his work at last year's International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications.

Source: New Scientist, Jan. 4, 2008.