As it’s known that, physics connects many disciplines, such as mathematics, physical chemistry, biochemistry, engineering, biology and medicine to tackle the question: What is life? Mind and Matter. Joel Cohen put it succinctly and brilliantly: “mathematics is biology’s next microscope, only better; biology is mathematics’ next physics, only better“.
My work is motivated by the question “What are the physical principles underlying living systems?”. Living systems are characterised by their ability to respond to fluctuations coming from the external and internal environments. Hence, they have mechanisms to stabilise the frequency and amplitude of the associated oscillations, and can be characterised as interacting self-sustained non-autonomous oscillators
In my work, I learn from nature, but I also try to be useful to nature. Recording time-series, and analyzing the underlying dynamics with our new algorithms, it is possible to investigate how racial (phenotype) effects plays distinctive roles in the vascular physiologies in a dynamical sense, or what happens when we recover from multiple episodes of malaria infection, or what changes take place in various cardiovascular diseases. Recently, we proposed an accurate non-invasive test for malaria that will be operable by unskilled persons and therefore has the potential to drastically improve diagnosis and health outcomes by facilitating earlier and diagnosis that is more accurate. The technique which is primarily premised on simultaneous measurement of the respiratory, ECG, skin temperature and blood flow oscillations, coupled with an analysis of their phase coherence and other nonlinear characteristics has already been validated in a small proof-of-concept study piloted on 47 malaria patients and 51 healthy controls in a hospital setting in northern Nigeria. A patent application on this invention is pending.
The next stage will be the development of a prototype instrument for use in a large-scale trial, which is an essential preliminary to the development and sale of a commercial instrument by industry, and we will approach potential manufacturers in the first instance.
I am currently working in the following areas: Machine learning (ML): I use artificial neural network, other application of ML to analyze biomedical signals including omics data. Multi-scale analysis of infectious disease: Premised on the intuition of physics of life, I study the nonlinear and time-varying dynamics, alongside mechanisms of Interactions between several physiological processes occurring on multiple scales in human system. Epidemiology of asymptomatic carriers: We are currently involved in the study of the effect of asymptomatic carrier in the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission in the USA.
