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.
