Biosurveillance, focused on the early detection of disease outbreaks, relies on classical statistical control charts for detecting disease outbreaks. However, such methods are not always suitable in this context. Assumptions of normality, independence and stationarity are typically violated in syndromic data. Furthermore, outbreak signatures are typically of unknown patterns and, therefore, cal...

Data useful for biosurveillance are often only available in a free-text format that can be easily read and understood by a human but not by a computer. Natural language processing (NLP) refers to automated methods for converting free-text data into computer-understandable format (Allen, 1995). This conversion is necessary so that information stored in free-text format can contribute to detectio...

Since the terrorist attacks and anthrax release in 2001, almost $32 billion has been allocated to biodefense and biosurveillance in the USA alone. Surveillance in health care refers to the continual systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data. When attempting to detect agents of bioterrorism, surveillance can occur in several ways. Syndromic surveillance occurs by...

S urveillance is the cornerstone of public health. Robust surveillance data and their analysis meaningfully impact public health action, planning, and prioritization. However, as Dr Alexander Langmuir stated in his 1962 Cutter Lecture on Preventive Medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health, “Good surveillance does not necessarily ensure making the right decisions, but it reduces the chanc...

Early, reliable detection of disease outbreaks is a critical problem today. This paper reports an investigation of the use of causal Bayesian networks to model spatio-temporal patterns of a non-contagious disease (respiratory anthrax infection) in a population of people. The number of parameters in such a network can become enormous, if not carefully managed. Also, inference needs to be perform...

BACKGROUND Clinical prediction rules do not incorporate real-time incidence data to adjust estimates of disease risk in symptomatic patients. OBJECTIVE To measure the value of integrating local incidence data into a clinical decision rule for diagnosing group A streptococcal (GAS) pharyngitis in patients aged 15 years or older. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of clinical and biosurveillance p...