Geographical visualization approach to perceive spatial scan statistics : an analysis of dengue fever outbreaks in Delhi

Abstract

In India, there is a strong need of a nation-wide disease surveillance system. As of now there are very few surveillance systems in India to detect disease outbreaks. IDSP (Integrated Disease Surveillance Project) was launched by Government of India with assistance of World Bank to detect and respond to disease outbreaks quickly. Still e orts are needed to strengthen the disease surveillance and response system for early detection of disease outbreaks. The strongest pillar of an accurate disease surveillance system is data related to cases and various risk factors. After data collection, the next important step is transformation of the collected data into meaningful information. Precise statistical methods are then required to analyse the information at hand. Disease outbreaks are detected using statistical analysis tools but for e ective disease control a visualization approach is required. Without appropriate visualization it is very di cult to interpret the results of analysis. In the work presented here, a statistical analysis is performed to detect space-time disease clusters and then the developed visualization approach is used to visualize the disease outbreaks. SaTScan software is integrated with the visualization approach to detect location of disease clusters and to test whether the detected clusters are statistically signi cant. Without the developed visualization approach users will have to run SaTScan soft- ware for each disease per data source. Hence, the presented work provides an extremely e cient and accurate technique for early detection of disease outbreak in the region covered by the surveillance system.