Dr. Oz and his crew were in Philadelphia giving 15 minute physicals and compiling the data from them for the mayor. Medigadget did an interview with Oz's medical unit clinical event director, Mike Hoaglin and caught this gem about GIS.
Medgadget: Are there any trends in medical technology or innovation (e.g. quantified self, big data analytics) that you and Dr. Oz are particularly excited about?
Hoaglin: In general, much of the data out there remain untapped and hold a treasure trove of information that can really transform the way we think about health. We’re particularly excited about the potential of decoding unstructured data through natural language processing technology, where we can pull critical data elements from prose writing. Incorporating GIS technology into disease surveillance will allow the earlier intervention in devasting health crises as tell-tale symptoms are reported earlier.
Kochi-based NGO, Centre for Advancement of Global Health (CAGH), is using satellite imagery and GIS to help eradicate mosqitos and the diseases they cause. Work like this has been done in Africa, but is now moving to India.
It aims to use satellite images to identify areas with high mosquito density and places where mosquito breeding is extensive. This will help health officials in fixing their target in their anti-mosquito drive to control diseases like dengue, malaria and chikungunya.
The original implementation of SUPRAMAP, a web-based application that synthesizes large, diverse datasets so that researchers can better understand the spread of infectious diseases across hosts and geography, was built with a single client that was tightly coupled to the server software. Now its gone open source.
"We now have decoupled the server from the original client to provide a modular web service for POY, (poyws.org) an open-source, freely available phylogenetic analysis program developed at AMNH. The web service can be used by other researchers with new ideas, data, and clients to create novel applications," said Ward Wheeler, curator-in-charge of scientific computing at AMNH and a coauthor with Janies and others on a recent article about the project in the journal Cladistics.
