Methods Work process flow diagrams, with associated explanations and historical examples, were developed based on in-person, structured interviews with public health and preventative medicine analysts from a variety of Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, and with one organization in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and with a major U.S. city health department. The parti...

This is directly applicable to a scalar signal (such as “number of respiratory cases today”. This method, more commonly used in computational finance, simply compares the count during the current time period with the weighted average of the counts of recent days. Exponential weighting is typically used, where the half-life is known as the “time window” parameter. This time-window parameter is t...

Introduction Living in a closely connected and highly mobile world presents many new mechanisms for rapid disease spread and in recent years, global disease surveillance has become a high priority. In addition, much like the contribution of non-traditional medicine to curing diseases, non-traditional data streams are being considered of value in disease surveillance. Los Alamos National Laborat...

Over the past two years, disaster preparedness has become an area of intense national focus. The threat of disease outbreaks, from naturally occurring pathogens or those maliciously introduced, has provoked a major response from the biomedical, public health, defense, and intelligence communities. A new information infrastructure and methods to support real time detection and monitoring of dise...

Biosurveillance of invasive species is critical for protecting native ecosystems and limiting economic losses. Early detection pathogens through qPCR methods has recently shown great promise can potentially slow the spread devastating diseases. For instance, oak wilt, a disease caused by fungus Bretziella fagacearum, kill mature trees within weeks infection. Originally contained in United State...

Objective The objective of this panel is to inform the ISDS community of the progress made in the Standards & Interoperability (S&I) Framework Public Health Reporting Initiative (PHRI). Also, it will provide some context of how the initiative will likely affect biosurveillance reporting in Meaningful Use Stage 3 and future harmonization of data standards requirements for public health reporting.

We have implemented an ontology-based text-mining tool for predicting disease outbreaks. This tool is designed to be used as a free and open-source plug-in for InSTEDD’s interactive biosurveillance system Riff. Availability. This tool, in its source code, is freely available from http://code.google.com/p/e-dop/.