NSA spins its web to snare terrorists. By Allison M. Heinrichs. Tribune Review (May 13, 2006). "Data mining means searching large volumes of information for patterns. ... Health departments use data mining to monitor daily sales of cold medicine to detect early regional flu outbreaks, and supermarkets mine their sales to find items that often are bought together so they can be bundled as promotional items. ... The process is similar to a project Carnegie Mellon's Auton Lab did for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create a system to track food complaints. By mining the complaints for patterns, a food-borne disease quickly could be tracked back to a processing plant. Then locations likely to have future outbreaks could be found and fixed. Two seemingly unrelated complaints in different parts of the country could be revealed as closely linked."

Profile - Larry Brilliant, Doctor looks to use technology to aid global health care. By Patrick Hoge. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com (February 24, 2006). "[Dr. Larry] Brilliant's plan: to create a vastly expanded, nongovernmental version of a Canadian Internet program that scours the world for information to help fight disease, poverty and suffering after catastrophes. The system, searching Web sites in seven languages, identifies for public health officials worldwide the first hints of nearly 40 percent of the disease outbreaks subsequently verified by the World Health Organization. ... One former colleague, Dr. Alfred Sommer, former dean of the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, pointed Brilliant to Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network, a Web-crawling computer application that led to early identification of a SARS outbreak in China. ... 'SARS is the pandemic that did not occur,' Brilliant said. The key with diseases, he said, is 'you find them early and kill them before they spread.' Anderson took the idea to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who subsequently chose Brilliant to lead Google.org, their new, $1 billion philanthropic arm. The serendipity of it all was fitting for a man whose life has been one long, strange trip."

• Also see:
  • Brilliant's Wish - Disease Alerts. By Kim Zetter. Wired News (February 23, 2006). "Larry Brilliant, appointed Tuesday as executive director of Google's new philanthropic organization, is expected to announce the project Thursday at the Technology, Entertainment and Design, or TED, conference here. ... In an interview with Wired News on Thursday, Brilliant said his wish will be to ask the group to help establish a global early-detection and early-response system for infectious diseases, modeled after the Global Public Health Intelligence Network. GPHIN is an internet-based early warning system that gathers information on public health threats and delivers the information to the United Nations in seven languages. 'The best thing the TED community can do is to take our servers and search engines and venture capital and build something that can last forever that has international independence,' Brilliant said. ... The GPHIN uses an internet crawler to scan 20,000 websites in seven languages for events and chatter recorded online on blogs, news sites and other outlets that point to the early outbreak of diseases. Brilliant envisions a system that, with the help of companies like Google, Sun and Microsoft, will scan 20 million sites and deliver information in dozens of languages. The system would be housed in a neutral country, independent of any government or company. Data would be backed up in a separate place, under a different time zone to avoid outages. ... GPHIN is currently run under the auspices Canada's Public Health Agency."

Use of proteomic patterns in serum to identify ovarian cancer. By Emanuel F. Petricoin III, Ali M. Ardekani, Ben A. Hitt, et al. (2002). Lancet 2002; 359: 572-77. The Introduction begins with: "Application of new technologies for detection of ovarian cancer could have an important effect on public health...."

• See the press release from The Lancet
• Scientists Report Initial Success With a Blood Test for Ovarian Cancer. By Denise Grady. The New York Times (February 8, 2002; free reg. req'd.).

Medical team tracks killer bugs. By Tom Bassing. Birmingham Business Journal (August 18, 2003). "MedMined Inc. and BlueCross BlueShield of Alabama have begun lining up as many as 40 Alabama hospitals to track - and ultimately diminish - nosocomial, or hospital-acquired, infections, which kill tens of thousands of patients nationwide every year. ... MedMined's technology, which [Stephen] Brossette developed as a graduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, allows participating hospitals - the system now is in place in some 30 medical centers nationwide - to send daily laboratory-culture reviews to the company through a secure computer connection. MedMined's computers break down the information and help identify areas within the facility that are of concern, allowing practitioners to take steps to alleviate patients' infectious risk. The company employs artificial intelligence to detect such problem areas without the hospital staff having to know where to look. It's 'a biological smoke alarm,' says Patrick Hymel, MedMined's chief medical officer, one that allows a hospital to deal with hot spots 'before the fire breaks out'"

Bush here today to highlight spending on terrorism. By James O'Toole, Christopher Snowbeck and Bill Heltzel. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 5, 2002). "One of the highlighted projects is a hospital computer system that could provide early detection and warning of bio-terror attacks. Called the Real-time Outbreak Disease Surveillance system, the 2-year-old program collects clinical information from 17 regional hospitals and looks for signs of infectious disease outbreaks. The system receives data about patient symptoms, ages, genders, addresses and test results directly from computers in emergency rooms and hospitals. It monitors 800 patient visits per day, looking for patterns that might point to a bio-terror attack. The surveillance system is just one of the research projects undertaken by the BioMedical Security Institute, a joint venture of Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health and Carnegie Mellon."And you can even read the text of the speech that President Bush delivered.

• Also see:
  • Bioterror monitoring software offered free to aid health groups. By Christopher Snowbeck. Post-Gazette (December 3, 2002). "Experimental software developed in Pittsburgh to detect evidence of a bioterror attack by monitoring activity in hospital emergency rooms is now being made available free to public health organizations across the country."

Ensuring water safety - Automatic warning devices may be answer to Walkerton. By Jeff Jedras (May 29, 2003). The Ottawa Citizen. "When seven people died and more than 2,000 became ill three years ago after an e-coli outbreak in Walkerton's water system, many people started to think how a recurrence could be prevented. While cities invested more in water treatment and a provincial inquiry investigated what went wrong, a small group of Eastern Ontario researchers also went to work, trying to see if there was a technological answer. ... 'It was really the Walkerton incident that made people realize here we are in what we think is a high-tech country, and something as simple as guaranteeing basic fresh water has been violated,' says project leader Kevin Hall, a civil engineering professor at Queen's University and head of Hall Coastal Canada, one of the industrial partners in the project. Other partners include Queen's and Precarn, an Ottawa-based robotics industry association. ... The team came up with an automated intelligent system, in a self-contained module. It eliminates the human reliability issue by taking a sample of water automatically into a testing chamber. Second, the e-coli test is performed automatically, and more quickly than before. Third, the intelligent system can take immediate corrective actions when a problem is detected, from notifying the appropriate persons to actually shutting down parts of the distribution system so no contaminated water is released."

An Intelligent System for Case Review and Risk Assessment in Social Services. By James R. Nolan. AI Magazine, 19(1): Spring 1998, 39-46. "This article reports on the development and implementation of DISXPERT, an intelligent rule-based system tool for referral of social security disability recipients to vocational rehabilitation services."

Detecting Bioterrorism - Lives could be saved by sensors and therapies now under development - along with software that could help distinguish an anthrax assault from an outbreak of the flu. By David Talbot. Technology Review (December 2001). "With airborne-pathogen detectors still in the lab, just realizing that an attack is under way could take precious time. So computer scientists are developing warning systems to spot early indicators of a biological attack, from troubling trends in patient symptoms to increases in school absenteeism. Known as bio-surveillance, the field aims to use data-mining techniques to recognize an epidemic days before the first cases are confirmed, says Kenneth Mandl, a pediatric emergency physician and informatics researcher at Children's Hospital Boston. Mandl and colleagues at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science have devised a computerized tracking system that uses emergency-room intake information to monitor the frequency of rashes, fevers, coughs and intestinal problems, symptoms associated with common ailments that would appear in uncommonly large numbers in the event of a deadly biological attack."

EASE for Windows. "A knowledge-based system for assessing workplace exposure to potentially hazardous new substances." From AIAI, the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

"HelpWorksª the eligibility screening solution designed to promote best practices in the human services. ... Based on advanced expert systems technology, HelpWorks uses decision rules to plan and guide a personalized interview. As HelpWorks learns more about your interests, needs and circumstances, it dynamically routes its interview to ensure that all needed questions are asked, finding the shortest path to the information being sought. No redundant or unnecessary questions are ever asked. Even very complex screenings -- for example, assessing eligibility for Medicaid or disaster relief benefits, or perhaps both simultaneously -- can be completed in just minutes."

RODS Laboratory - Real Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance. "a collaboration between researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the Auton Lab in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Drs. Wagner, Tsui, and Espino founded the laboratory in 1999 to investigate methods for real-time detection and assessment of disease outbreaks. Current research interests of the faculty include algorithm development, assessment of novel types of surveillance data, natural language processing and analyses of detectability (described in Publications and Research)."

• As recounted on their History & Key Events page: " On February 5, 2002 President George W. Bush, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson visited Pittsburgh for a demonstration of the RODS system. Following the demonstration, The President called the system the 'modern DEW line,' referring to the Distant Early Warning radar system employed during the Cold War to guard against an attack from the Soviet Union."

Other References Offline

doctor.gif"doctor" A Bioterror Warning System Thumbs Up. CBS News (September 21, 2002). "A new U.S. military health surveillance network caught an outbreak of diarrhea at a Marine facility before doctors there were even aware of it, and could detect both sneak bioterror attacks and natural epidemics, one of the organizers said Saturday. ... The system, called Essence [Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics], tracks reports of symptoms and the diagnoses made by military doctors. It recently added information from two large civilian health maintenance organizations. 'We believe that this surveillance system can provide early detection of disease outbreaks such as influenza and possibly intentional acts,' Lewis and colleagues wrote in a study to be published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. ... The computerized system, which plots data on a graph and sorts it by symptoms, age group, zip code and other factors, detected a spike in people complaining of cough, fever and other classic flu symptoms. The first move was to check against historical data, which showed a similar increase during the year before, but five to six weeks later."

Clearing the air - New device sniffs offices. By Peter Healy. The Advocate (February 18, 2003). "Pro Services calls the $25,000 device the IAQ 4000 system. The acronym stands for indoor air quality. The company that makes it, Aircuity Inc. of Newton, Mass., refers to that equipment as the Aircuity Building Performance and Indoor Air Evaluation System, said spokesman Robert Skinner. The system consists of a portable air sampling device, a Web-based data collection and reporting tool and an artificial intelligence-based diagnostic program. It monitors and analyzes temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, airborne particles, total volatile organic compounds, mold and pollen, ozone and radon. ... [Tony Abate] sees a growing market for more intense air quality testing now that problems with mold in school buildings have surfaced."