Faced with the very real threat of bioterrorism, the critical need for early detection of an outbreak has shortened the time frame for major enhancements to our public health infrastructure. The early detection of covert biological attacks requires real time data streams revealing of the health of the population, as well as novel methods to detect abnormalities.

Heightened concerns about bioterrorism are forcing changes to the traditional biosurveillance-model. Public health departments are under pressure to follow multiple, non-specific, pre-diagnostic indicators, often drawn from many data sources. As a result, there is a need for biosurveillance systems that can use a variety of analysis techniques to rapidly integrate and process multiple diverse d...

The goals of automated biosurveillance systems are to detect disease outbreaks early, while exhibiting few false positives. Evaluation measures currently exist to estimate the expected detection time of biosurveillance systems. Researchers also have developed models that estimate clinician detection of cases of outbreak diseases, which is a process known as clinical case finding. However, littl...

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