Animated plot of infectious disease spread with for loop (Matlab) - matlab

Question

I'm a beginner in Matlab and I'm trying to model the spread of an infectious disease using Matlab. However, I encounter some problems.
At first, I define the matrices that need to be filled and their initial status:
diseasematrix=zeros(20,20);
inirow=10;
inicol=10;
diseasematrix(inirow,inicol)=1; % The first place where a sick person is
infectionmatrix=zeros(20,20); % Infected people, initially all 0
healthymatrix=round(rand(20,20)*100); % Initial healthy population (randomly)
Rate=0.0001; % Rate of spread
Now, I want to make a plot where the spread of the disease is shown, using a for loop. But i'm stuck here...
for t=1:365
Zneighboursum=zeros(size(diseasematrix));
out_ZT = calc_ZT(Zneighboursum, diseasematrix);
infectionmatrix(t) = round((Rate).*(out_ZT));
diseasematrix(t) = diseasematrix(t-1) + infectionmatrix(t-1);
healthymatrix(t) = healthymatrix(t-1) - infectionmatrix(t-1);
imagesc(diseasematrix(t));
title(sprintf('Day %i',t));
drawnow;
end
This basically says that the infectionmatrix is calculated based upon the formula in the loop, the diseasematrix is calculated by adding up the sick people of the previous timestep with the infected people of the previous time. The healthy people that remain are calculated by substracting the healthy people of the previous time step with the infected people. The variable out_ZT is a function I made:
function [ZT] = calc_ZT(Zneighboursum, diseasematrix)
Zneighboursum = Zneighboursum + circshift(diseasematrix,[1 0]);
Zneighboursum = Zneighboursum + circshift(diseasematrix,[0 1]);
ZT=Zneighboursum;
end
This is to quantify the number of sick people around a central cell.
However, the result is not what I want. The plot does not evolve dynamically and the values don't seem to be right. Can anyone help me?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There are several problems with the code:
(Rate).*(out_ZT) is wrong. Because first one is a scalar and
second is a matrix, while .* requires both to be matrices of the
same size. so a single * would work.
The infectionmatrix,
diseasematrix, healthymatrix are all 2 dimensional matrices and
in order to keep them in memory you need to have a 3 dimensional
matrix. But since you don't use the things you store later you can
just rewrite on the old one.
You store integers in the
infectionmatrix, because you calculate it with round(). That
sets the result always to zero.
The value for Rate was too low to see any result. So I increased it to 0.01 instead
(just a cautionary point) you haven't used healthymatrix in your code anywhere.
The code for the function is fine, so after debugging according to what I perceived, here's the code:
diseasematrix=zeros(20,20);
inirow=10;
inicol=10;
diseasematrix(inirow,inicol)=1; % The first place where a sick person is
infectionmatrix=zeros(20,20); % Infected people, initially all 0
healthymatrix=round(rand(20,20)*100); % Initial healthy population (randomly)
Rate=0.01;
for t=1:365
Zneighboursum=zeros(size(diseasematrix));
out_ZT = calc_ZT(Zneighboursum, diseasematrix);
infectionmatrix = (Rate*out_ZT);
diseasematrix = diseasematrix + infectionmatrix;
healthymatrix = healthymatrix - infectionmatrix;
imagesc(diseasematrix);
title(sprintf('Day %i',t));
drawnow;
end

Answer 2

There is several problems:
1) If you want to save a 3D matrix you will need a 3D vector:
so you have to replace myvariable(t) by myvariable(:,:,t);
2) Why did you use round ? if you round a value < 0.5 the result will be 0. So nothing will change in your loop.
3) You need to define the boundary condition (t=1) and then start your loop with t = 2.
diseasematrix=zeros(20,20);
inirow=10;
inicol=10;
diseasematrix(inirow,inicol)=1; % The first place where a sick person is
infectionmatrix =zeros(20,20); % Infected people, initially all 0
healthymatrix=round(rand(20,20)*100); % Initial healthy population (randomly)
Rate=0.01; % Rate of spread
for t=2:365
Zneighboursum=zeros(size(diseasematrix,1),size(diseasematrix,2));
out_ZT = calc_ZT(Zneighboursum, diseasematrix(:,:,t-1));
infectionmatrix(:,:,t) = (Rate).*(out_ZT);
diseasematrix(:,:,t) = diseasematrix(:,:,t-1) + infectionmatrix(:,:,t-1);
healthymatrix(:,:,t) = healthymatrix(:,:,t-1) - infectionmatrix(:,:,t-1);
imagesc(diseasematrix(:,:,t));
title(sprintf('Day %i',t));
drawnow;
end
IMPORTANT: circshift clone your matrix in order to deal with the boundary effect.