Coordinated Syndromic Surveillance through Visual Analytics

The role of public health surveillance is to collect, analyze and interpret data about biological agents, diseases, risk factors and other health events in order to provide timely dissemination of collected information to decision makers. Recently, the detection of adverse health events has focused on pre-diagnosis information to improve response time. This type of detection is more largely termed syndromic surveillance and involves the collection and analysis of statistical health trend data bringing together a variety of disparate data sources such as emergency department visit records, pharmaceutical sales, pet medical records and many others. Given the magnitude and variety of these data sources, advanced tool sets are needed that allow the user to interact with their data in a visual environment that provides direct analytic capability for finding data aberrations. In this talk, I will present a suite of tools designed to facilitate the exploration of syndromic surveillance data. Case studies and findings will be used to demonstrate the impact of such techniques, as well as illustrating the need for the coordinated linkage of human, animal and environmental health. Case studies will include our analysis of pet records in relation to localized Mercaptan spill and seasonal trend relationships in pet and human health.

Contact

  Ash Pathak
  akp13@psu.edu
  814-867-2941