Automated systems and methods for obtaining, storing, processing and utilizing immunologic information of individuals and populations for various uses

• US 8,498,879 B2
• Filed: 11/10/2008
• Issued: 07/30/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 04/27/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Wellstat Vaccines LLC (Wellstat Group of Cos.)
• Original Assignee: Wellstat Vaccines LLC (Wellstat Group of Cos.)
• Inventors: Michon, Francis, Moore, Samuel L., Wohlstadter, Samuel J., Davis, Charles Quentin, Otero, Glen, Haleva, Aaron
• Primary Examiner(s): Lubin, Valerie
• Assistant Examiner(s): KANAAN, MAROUN P
• Application Number:
  US12/291,529
• Publication Number:
  US 20090299767A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,723 Days
• Field of Search: 705/2, 705/3
• US Class Current: 705/2
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/22 Social work or social welfare, e.g. community support activities or counselling services
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 10/60 for patient-specific data, e.g. for electronic patient records
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 50/30 for calculating health indices; for individual health risk assessment
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 50/70 for mining of medical data, e.g. analysing previous cases of other patients
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 50/80 for detecting, monitoring or modelling epidemics or pandemics, e.g. flu
• CPC Class Codes: Y02A 90/10 Information and communication technologies [ICT] supporting adaptation to climate change, e.g. for weather forecasting or climate simulation

Abstract

A system and method for assessing the immunological status of one or more individuals in a patient population is presented. The method includes establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each representative of the immune status of an individual in the population, each of said records including (1) current information from one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical, and (2) individual specific information comprising one or more of said individual'"'"'s medical history, said individual'"'"'s doctors'"'"' observations and historical, demographic, lifestyle, and familial information relating to said individual. The method further includes processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population; and using the said trends or patterns as part of a health care related decision making process.

Claims

1. A computerized method of analyzing immunological and other information pertaining to a population of individuals, comprising:

(a) establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each record comprising one or more fields, where each such field contains;

(1) the results of one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical, or

(2) individual-specific information comprising one or more of said individual'"'"'s medical history, doctors'"'"' observations of said individual and/or historical, demographic, lifestyle, and familial information relating to said individual;

(b) segmenting the population by commonality as to values in one or more of the fields;

(c) as to each segment;

automatically processing the information in said segment of the database to find a first set of correlations between clusters of two or more fields of records within each segment of individuals in the population;

(d) automatically processing each correlation to generate a second set of correlations; and

(e) for each correlation in the second set;

for each field in the cluster, automatically generating a set of hypotheses or other relevant data that may explain the correlation; and

(f) reporting the second set of correlations, their associated hypotheses and related information to a user,

wherein the segmenting, processing, and generating steps are performed using a data processor.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising using the correlations found in (c) and (d) as part of a health care related decision making process.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said segmentation can include binning a value of a field, where such field has a range of possible values in the database.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein said segmentation includes binning by age, by region of origin, by country of origin, by fraction of the dynamic range of an assay result.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein said generating a set of hypotheses or other relevant data comprises at least one of a search of an internal hypothesis database and an external Internet search.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said processing each correlation to generate a second set of correlations includes further segmenting each segmentation by one or more fields in the database to increase the value of said correlation.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein said processing each correlation to generate a second set of correlations includes incrementally increasing a minimum threshold of correlation values and tracking the threshold value at which each correlation drops out.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein said segmenting includes segmenting by age, a geographical value and sex.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein said segmenting further includes binning the age value by one of 1, 5, 10 and 20 year bins.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the data is reprocessed so as to plot each of the second set of correlations in a graph of correlation value as a function of age.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising the first set of correlations.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the second set of correlations is reported via heat maps for each segment and a listing of the correlation value in each cell of each heat map.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the first and second set of correlations is used to generate first and second sets of heat maps, and wherein said processing each correlation includes performing image processing algorithms on the first set of heat maps to generate the second set of heat maps.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein the results of one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical are obtained electronically from an assay reading device, and the individual specific information is obtained from at least one electronic medical records.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the at least one electronic medical records includes a Google Personal Health Record.

16. The method of claim 15, applied collectively to a set of individuals.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein a first assay panel containing a plurality of cytokine assays is administered, and based on automatic analyses of the cytokine data, the assays comprising the database records are chosen.

18. A computerized method of analyzing an individual'"'"'s immunological state, comprising:

(a) establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information for a number of individuals, each record comprising one or more fields, where each such field contains;

(1) the results of one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical, or

(2) individual-specific information comprising one or more of said individual'"'"'s medical history, doctors'"'"' observations of said individual and/or historical, demographic, lifestyle, and familial information relating to said individual;

(b) segmenting the population by commonality as to values in one or more of the fields;

(c) as to each segment;

automatically processing the information in said segment of the database to find a first set of correlations between clusters of two or more fields of records within each segment of individuals in the population;

(d) automatically processing each correlation to generate a second set of correlations; and

(e) applying a set of rules to the individual'"'"'s record to generate health care recommendations and findings, said findings including whether the individual supports any of the first or the second set of correlations found for the individuals in a first and a second segment to which the individual belongs

wherein the segmenting, processing, and applying steps are performed using a data processor.

19. The method of claim 18, applied collectively to a set of individuals.

20. The method of claim 18, wherein said one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical comprises a plurality of cytokine assays.

21. The method of claim 18, wherein a first assay panel containing a plurality of cytokine assays is administered, and based on automatic analyses of the cytokine data, the assays comprising the database records are chosen.

22. A computerized method of analyzing information related to the immune status of one or more individuals in a population, comprising:

(a) establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each representative of the immune status of an individual in the population each of said records including;

(i) current information from one or more assays to determine the immunity of said individual to one or more vaccine-preventable diseases; and

(ii) patient-specific information comprising one or more of said patient'"'"'s medical history, said patients doctors observations, and/or social, environmental, lifestyle and other demographic information relating to said patient; and

(b) processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population;

wherein said processing the information in said database includes;

generating a list of correlations between variables or fields in the database;

for each correlation in the list;

generating a set of hypotheses that may explain said correlation; and

as to each hypothesis in the set, automatically analyzing the data to refute, support or stating that there is insufficient data to analyze said hypothesis by further processing of the database

wherein the processing, generating, and analyzing steps are performed using a data processor.

23. A computerized method for analyzing information related to the immune status of one or more individuals in a population, comprising:

(a) establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each representative of the immune status of an individual in the population, to one or more vaccine-preventable diseases, each of said records including

(1) current information from one or more assays to determine the immunity of said individual to one or more vaccine-preventable diseases, and

(2) patient-specific information comprising one or more of said patients medical history, said patients doctors observations and/or demographic information relating to said patient;

(b) updating said records from time to time with current information as recited in (a)(1) and/or (a)(2);

(c) processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population;

(d) modifying the said algorithms to reflect the patterns and trends found in step (c);

(e) processing the information in an individual'"'"'s record through said algorithms, and

(f) processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population;

wherein said processing the information in said database includes;

generating a list of correlations between variables or fields in the database;

for each correlation in the list;

generating a set of hypotheses that may explain said correlation; and

as to each hypothesis in the set, automatically analyzing the data to refute, support or stating that there is insufficient data to analyze said hypothesis by further processing of the database

wherein the processing, modifying, generating, and analyzing steps are performed using a data processor.

24. A computerized method for generating recommendations for vaccinating one or more individuals in a patient population, comprising:

(a) establishing a database comprising a plurality of records of information each representative of the immune status of an individual in the population, to one or more vaccine-preventable diseases, each of said records including

(i) current information from one or more assays to determine the immunity of said individual to one or more vaccine-preventable diseases, and

(ii) patient-specific information comprising one or more of said patient'"'"'s medical history, said patients doctors observations, and/or demographic information relating to said patient;

(b) updating said database from time to time with current information;

(c) providing one or more algorithms to determine whether or not to vaccinate said individuals based upon an assay result for antibodies for said one or more vaccine-preventable diseases and other defined factors;

(d) processing the information in said database to find trends or patterns relating to the immune status of individuals in said patient population to said vaccine preventable disease;

(e) incorporating information comprising said patterns or trends into one or more of said algorithms;

(f) processing the information in an individual'"'"'s record through one or more of said algorithms, and

(g) thereby generating a recommendation for vaccinating said individual;

wherein said processing the information in said database includes;

generating a list of correlations between variables or fields in the database;

for each correlation in the list;

generating a set of hypotheses that may explain said correlation; and

as to each hypothesis in the set, automatically analyzing the data to refute, support or stating that there is insufficient data to analyze said hypothesis by further processing of the database

wherein the processing, generating, and analyzing steps are performed using a data processor.

25. A system, comprising:

at least one local assay device;

a central processor connected to an input/output device;

a system database;

a hypothesis database;

a rules database; and

a data network connecting the local assay devices and the central processor;

wherein in operation immunologic and other data relative to a plurality of individuals is obtained at the assay devices and sent to the system database for storage, and wherein the central processor accesses said data and firstly processes said data to find correlations between variables or fields in the database across many individuals, and secondly processes said correlations via rules stored in said rules database to generate a set of hypotheses from those stored in said hypothesis database, and thirdly processes said hypotheses and said data to confirm, exclude or state as inconclusive each of said hypotheses for one or more of said correlations.

26. A computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable program code means embodied therein, wherein the computer usable medium is a data processor and the computer readable program code means in said computer program product comprises means for causing a computer to:

establish a database comprising a plurality of records of information each record comprising one or more fields, where each such field contains;

(1) the results of one or more assays for the presence of a biochemical, or

(2) individual-specific information comprising one or more of said individual'"'"'s medical history, doctors'"'"' observations of said individual and/or historical, demographic, lifestyle, and familial information relating to said individual;

(b) segment the population by commonality as to values in one or more of the fields;

(c) as to each segment;

automatically process the information in said segment of the database to find a first set of correlations between clusters of two or more fields of records within each segment of individuals in the population;

(c) automatically process each correlation to generate a second set of correlations; and

(d) for each correlation in the second set;

for each field in the cluster, automatically generating a set of hypotheses or other relevant data that may explain the correlation; and

(e) reporting the second set of correlations, their associated hypotheses and related information to a user.