Abstract
The prevention and control of dengue are great public health challenges for many countries, particularly since 2015, as other arboviruses have been observed to interact significantly with dengue virus. Different approaches and methodologies have been proposed and discussed by the research community. An important tool widely used is modeling and simulation, which help us to understand epidemic dynamics and create scenarios to support planning and decision making processes. With this aim, we proposed and developed DengueME, a collaborative open source platform to simulate dengue disease and its vector’s dynamics. It supports compartmental and individual-based models, implemented over a GIS database, that represent Aedes aegypti population dynamics, human demography, human mobility, urban landscape and dengue transmission mediated by human and mosquito encounters. A user-friendly graphical interface was developed to facilitate model configuration and data input, and a library of models was developed to support teaching-learning activities. DengueME was applied in study cases and evaluated by specialists. Other improvements will be made in future work, to enhance its extensibility and usability.
Highlights
Dengue incidence increased rapidly in the last two decades [1,2,3]
We argue for a tool that allows building pedagogical, theoretical and empirical models of dengue transmission and vector ecology, using different scales and different paradigms, with support for the use of real data, ranging from simple time series, such as daily temperatures, to more complex urban geographic data
The model library and user-friendly interface of DengueME support teaching-learning activities based on the creation and analysis of what-if scenarios, such as: (i) whether vector population dynamics is influenced by seasonal factors (what happens to the transmission dynamics of dengue if the vector population increases?); (ii) several factors that affect virus transmission between vectors and humans are combined into a single parameter in the model
Summary
Dengue incidence increased rapidly in the last two decades [1,2,3]. Some estimates suggest that almost 390 million new infections occur each year [3], and about half of the world’s population is. Several dynamic models have been developed to describe dengue transmission dynamics in space and time [49,50,51,52] and the behavior of its primary vector, Ae. aegypti [8,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60] They are fundamental tools for comparing different control methods and can evaluate what-if scenarios, but creating computational models accounting for several populations (metapopulation models), heterogeneity (e.g., variations in susceptibility and in responses to infection) and spatial heterogeneity requires great expertise and advanced programming skills. DengueME provides: (i) a collection of built-in models that can be combined to represent various scenarios; (ii) a modeling language that accommodates both compartmental models and individual-based models; (iii) a user-friendly graphical interface for easy model selection and configuration; (iv) a flexible and extensible architecture to allow contribution from users; and (v) a standard format for data exchange to allow communication between DengueME models
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