Early intervention with an ACD seems to have a positive impact on QoL and gives patients the opportunity to improve skills for communication in later disease stages.

No abstract

The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has simultaneous time and space dynamics. This behaviour results from a complex combination of factors, including social ones, which lead to significant differences in the evolution of the spatiotemporal pattern between and within countries. Usually, spatial smoothing techniques are used to map health outcomes, and rarely uncertainty of the spatial predictions are assessed. As an alternative, we propose to apply direct block sequential simulation to model the spatial distribution of the COVID-19 infection risk in mainland Portugal. Given the daily number of infection data provided by the Portuguese Directorate-General for Health, the daily updates of infection rates are calculated by municipality and used as experimental data in the geostatistical simulation. The model considers the uncertainty/error associated with the size of each municipality’s population. The calculation of daily updates of the infection risk maps results from the median model of one ensemble of 100 geostatistical realizations of daily updates of the infection risk. The ensemble of geostatistical realizations is also used to calculate the associated spatial uncertainty of the spatial prediction using the interquartile distance. The risk maps are updated daily and show the regions with greater risks of infection and the critical dynamics related to its development over time.

We have developed a new iterative geostatistical seismic amplitude variation with angle (AVA) inversion algorithm that inverts prestack seismic data, sorted by angle gathers, directly for highresolution density, P-wave velocity, S-wave velocity, and facies models. This novel iterative geostatistical inverse procedure is based on two key main principles: the use of stochastic sequential simulation and cosimulation as the perturbation technique of the model parameter space and a global optimizer based on a crossover genetic algorithm to converge the simulated earth models toward an objective function, in this case, the mismatch between the recorded and synthetic prestack seismic data. As a geostatistical approach, all the elastic models simulated during the iterative pro cedure honors the well-log data at its own locations, the marginal prior distributions of P-wave velocity and S-wave velocity, and density estimated from the available well-log data, and the corresponding joint distributions between density versus P-wave velocity and P-wave versus S-wave velocity. We successfully tested and implemented this new algorithm on a synthetic prestack data set that mimicked the main properties of a real reservoir, and on a real seismic data set acquired over a deepwater turbidite oil reservoir. In both cases, the results showed a good convergence between the recorded and synthetic seismic. The synthetic example showed high-resolution inverted petroelastic models that reproduced the true petroelastic models. The inverted petroelastic models retrieved from the real case study found high resolution and do agree with previous seismic reservoir characterization studies.

The prediction of rock properties in the subsurface from geophysical data generally requires the solution of a mathematical inverse problem. Because of the large size of geophysical (seismic) data sets and subsurface models, it is common to reduce the dimension of the problem by applying dimension reduction methods and considering a reparameterization of the model and/or the data. Especially for high-dimensional nonlinear inverse problems, in which the analytical solution of the problem is not available in a closed form and iterative sampling or optimization methods must be applied to approximate the solution, model and/or data reduction reduce the computational cost of the inversion. However, part of the information in the data or in the model can be lost by working in the reduced model and/or data space. We have focused on the uncertainty quantification in the solution of the inverse problem with data and/or model order reduction. We operate in a Bayesian setting for the inversion and uncertainty quantification and validate the proposed approach in the linear case, in which the posterior distribution of the model variables can be analytically written and the uncertainty of the model predictions can be exactly assessed. To quantify the changes in the uncertainty in the inverse problem in the reduced space, we compare the uncertainty in the solution with and without data and/or model reduction. We then extend the approach to nonlinear inverse problems in which the solution is computed using an ensemble-based method. Examples of applications to linearized acoustic and nonlinear elastic inversion allow quantifying the impact of the application of reduction methods to model and data vectors on the uncertainty of inverse problem solutions. Examples of applications to linearized acoustic and nonlinear elastic inversion are shown.