BACKGROUND Visual analytics, a technique aiding data analysis and decision making, is a novel tool that allows for a better understanding of the context of complex systems. Public health professionals can greatly benefit from this technique since context is integral in disease monitoring and biosurveillance. We propose a graphical tool that can reveal the distribution of an outcome by time and ...

MOTIVATION Metagenomic sequencing of clinical samples provides a promising technique for direct pathogen detection and characterization in biosurveillance. Taxonomic analysis at the strain level can be used to resolve serotypes of a pathogen in biosurveillance. Sigma was developed for strain-level identification and quantification of pathogens using their reference genomes based on metagenomic ...

Introduction: Emergency Department (ED) records and over-the-counter (OTC) sales data are two of the most commonly used data sources for syndromic surveillance. Most current detection algorithms monitor these data sources separately, and either do not combine them, or combine them in an ad hoc fashion. This paper introduces a causal model that coherently combines the two data sources in order t...

This chapter proposes an enhancement to currently used algorithms for monitoring daily counts of pre-diagnostic data. Rather than use a single algorithm or apply multiple algorithms simultaneously, our approach is based on ensembles of algorithms. The ensembles lead to better performance in terms of higher true alert rates for a given false alert rate. Combinations can be employed at the data p...

We describe the implementation of an automated infectious disease surveillance system that uses data collected from 210 microbiologic laboratories throughout the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in France. Each week, these facilities report bacterial species that have been isolated from patients in their area. An alarm is triggered whenever the case count for a bacterial species infection exce...

DNA barcoding has proven an effective tool for species identification in varied groups of marine invertebrates including crustaceans, molluscs, polychaetes and echinoderms. In this study, we further validate its utility by analyzing almost half of the 300 species of Echinodermata known from Canadian waters. COI sequences from 999 specimens were assigned to 145 BINs. In most cases, species discr...