Growing interest in use of geographic information systems in health and healthcare research: a review of PubMed from 2003 to 2011

The earliest use of geographical information systems (GIS) in medicine possibly goes back to 1854, when John Snow mapped the outbreak of cholera in London and successfully traced the source of the disease. Years have now passed and the term ‘Geographic Information Systems’ was added to the controlled vocabulary thesaurus of US National Library of Medicine – MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) – in 2003. ‘Geographic Information Systems’ has been defined in PubMed as ‘Computer systems capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically referenced information, i.e. data identified according to their locations’.