Research
NetSurv: Monitoring Tools for Disease Surveillance
Leah Estberg, BioMedware, Inc., PI
This work was supported by an SBIR phase I grant from the National Cancer Institute in 2001 (R43-CA090086 ).
Research Abstract
The objective of this project is to provide disease trend monitoring software tools that maintain direct access to surveillance data sources and support prompt analysis and public health actions.
Specific goals in terms of what the proposed system will achieve for a public health department:
- Real-time disease surveillance and decision support oriented toward immediate response
- Promote sharing of data, analysis, and knowledge across the health department
- Provide ready graphical views of temporal and spatial disease patterns as plots and maps
This project will take advantage of recent technological innovations that allow direct software and data sharing, timely data access, and transparent data integration and synthesis. Significant progress in distributed object computing (CORBA) provides the ideal opportunity to explore innovative models for providing modular data analysis and interpretation support tools. Both computing and data resources can be fully integrated and securely provided over computer networks. The ultimate target is to deliver opportune analytic and visualization tools capable of accessing and integrating multiple data sources, incorporating new cases submitted since last run for efficient, proactive monitoring in a secure and responsive system.
Software
Sample cumulative sum plot from the NetSurv phase I prototype.
The cumulative sum plot tracks temporal disease patterns.
BioMedware created a prototype web application and web help. The final software product and documents will be finished in phase II of this project. Once completed, this product will be available from our commercialization partner, TerraSeer.
Conference
BioMedware hosted a conference in December, 2001, for planning and review of the NetSurv project.