Development, adaptation, and assessment of alerting algorithms for biosurveillance

The goal of APL's biosurveillance effort is to assist the public health community in the early recognition of disease outbreaks. ESSENCE II, the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-basedEpidemics, applies alerting algorithms to "anonymized" consumer data to give epidemiologists early cues to potential health threats in the National Capital Area. Raw data include traditional indicators such as hospital emergency room visits as well as nontraditional indicators such as physician office visits and less-specific, but potentially timelier, indicators such as sales of over-the-counter remedies. To improve the timeliness of alerting for disease outbreaks, we have adapted temporal and spatiotemporal algorithms from various disciplines, including signal processing, data mining, statistical process control, and epidemiology.

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