Global disease surveillance platform: Coupling of initial surveillance analysis to response planning and evaluation

A rich variety of information processing capabilities, proven in other domains, can be tailored to assimilate information electronically received, positioning those monitoring the situation and those directing the response to act more knowledgably. The approach taken integrates technology from other domains which have surveillance missions, specifically intelligence processing that can be converted for global disease surveillance. The Global Disease Surveillance Platform (or GDSP) prototype was developed to provide public health authorities and responding organizations with timely access to critical information. GDSP is equipped with processes which offer situational awareness and makes timely analysis and response possible. Construction of the platform prototype focused on three specific areas: data acquisition and indexing, a data query user interface, and situational awareness/visualization and response. Data acquisition and indexing are responsible for processing data consumed by the platform. Data fusion components index, tag, and analyze both structured and unstructured data that link similar information together. The situation awareness components provide the platform with the ability to detect anomalies, clusters of potential events, predict the rate and spread of a disease outbreak, and provide the analysts and decision makers with tools, methodologies and processes to investigate the event and further enable and evaluate the timely and appropriate response. Various visualization, geospatial and spatio-temporal analysis and tools are key components that the platform supports.