Enhancing Understanding of Long COVID Using Novel Mathematical Clustering Techniques

新城疫大流行继续对生命造成有害影响。截至2022年1月，英国国家统计局估计，英国有150万人患有长期COVID。其中约65%的人出现症状，对日常活动产生不良影响。然而，对长期COVID的了解仍处于早期阶段，还有许多悬而未决的问题。我们能根据症状的严重程度和持续时间对患者进行分组吗？新冠肺炎病毒的不同变种是否与不同的症状有关？我们能否找出与慢性冠状病毒感染相关的因素？这个跨学科的项目将结合纯数学、统计学和数据科学的技术，与临床医生和患者充分合作，解决这些问题。它将利用来自队列研究和电子记录的数据。该项目将发展图论和拓扑数据分析的想法，以产生被称为集群的相似患者组。这将允许识别长期COVID患者和表明长期COVID风险增加的因素。该项目还将提供易于使用的计算机工具，以实施和可视化该方法。该项目将提供纯数学、统计学或计算机方面的适当培训。该项目的结果将使NHS受益，使治疗和康复能够针对受影响最严重的人。

The COVID pandemic continues to have a detrimental impact on lives. As of January 2022, the ONS estimated that there are 1.5 million people in the UK experiencing Long COVID. Around 65% of these have symptoms which lead to an adverse effect on day-to-day activities.Understanding of Long COVID is however still in its early stages and there are many unanswered questions. Can we group people by severity of their symptoms and how long they persist? Are different variants of the COVID-19 virus related to different symptoms? Can we identify factors associated with more debilitating forms of Long COVID?This intradisciplinary project will bring together techniques from pure mathematics, statistics and data science to address these questions, in full collaboration with clinicians and patients. It will make use of data from cohort studies and electronic records.The project will develop ideas from graph theory and topological data analysis to produce groups of similar patients called clusters. These will allow the identification of Long COVID sufferers and of factors indicating an increased Long COVID risk. The project will also provide easy-to-use computer tools to implement and visualize the methodology. Appropriate training in pure mathematics, statistics or computing will be provided.The project's results will benefit the NHS, allowing treatments and rehabilitation to be targeted at the most affected people.