Mobility-GCN: a human mobility-based graph convolutional network for tracking and analyzing the spatial dynamics of the synthetic opioid crisis in the USA, 2013-2020
This addresses the synthetic opioid crisis for public health officials by providing a method to analyze spatial dynamics, but it is incremental as it applies an existing model to new data.
The study tackled tracking the spread of synthetic opioid-involved deaths in the U.S. from 2013 to 2020 by analyzing spatiotemporal patterns and comparing them with heroin-involved deaths, using a graph convolutional neural network that incorporated spatial connections and human mobility between counties.
Synthetic opioids are the most common drugs involved in drug-involved overdose mortalities in the U.S. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2018, about 70% of all drug overdose deaths involved opioids and 67% of all opioid-involved deaths were accounted for by synthetic opioids. In this study, we investigated the spread of synthetic opioids between 2013 and 2020 in the U.S. We analyzed the relationship between the spatiotemporal pattern of synthetic opioid-involved deaths and another key opioid, heroin, and compared patterns of deaths involving these two types of drugs during this period. Spatial connections and human mobility between counties were incorporated into a graph convolutional neural network model to represent and analyze the spread of synthetic opioid-involved deaths in the context of previous heroin-involved death patterns.