Lifestyle Disease Surveillance Using Population Search Behavior: Feasibility Study

The feasibility of COPD surveillance in Ontario: a population study.

The Issue Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), also known as emphysema or chronic bronchitis, is a progressive chronic respiratory disorder characterized by non-reversible obstruction of the airways in the lungs. It is characterized clinically by shortness of breath, cough, sputum production, wheeze and limited exercise tolerance and can lead to respiratory failure and death. While pre...

Ten-year trends in major lifestyle risk factors using an ongoing population surveillance system in Australia

BACKGROUND Understanding how risk factors (tobacco, alcohol, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol) change over time is a critical aim of public health. The associations across the social gradient over time are important considerations. Risk factor surveillance systems have a part to play in understanding the epidemiological distribution of the risk fact...

Disease Surveillance, Case Study

Event Detection Identifying patterns of interest in large temporal datasets Spatial Scan Statistic A method for identifying hotspots in spatial data, widely used in epidemiology and biosurveillance Scoring Function An objective function that measures the anomalousness of a subset of data LTSS Linear-time subset scanning Time to Detect Evaluation metric; time delay before detecting an event Over...

Non-communicable disease surveillance and population surveys.

Analyzing Search Behavior of Healthcare Professionals for Drug Safety Surveillance

Post-market drug safety surveillance is hugely important and is a significant challenge despite the existence of adverse event (AE) reporting systems. Here we describe a preliminary analysis of search logs from healthcare professionals as a source for detecting adverse drug events. We annotate search log query terms with biomedical terminologies for drugs and events, and then perform a statisti...