Showing papers by "Mika Shigematsu published in 2007"

A multilingual ontology for infectious disease surveillance: rationale, design and challenges

Abstract: A lack of surveillance system infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region is seen as hindering the global control of rapidly spreading infectious diseases such as the recent avian H5N1 epidemic. As part of improving surveillance in the region, the BioCaster project aims to develop a system based on text mining for automatically monitoring Internet news and other online sources in several regional languages. At the heart of the system is an application ontology which serves the dual purpose of enabling advanced searches on the mined facts and of allowing the system to make intelligent inferences for assessing the priority of events. However, it became clear early on in the project that existing classification schemes did not have the necessary language coverage or semantic specificity for our needs. In this article we present an overview of our needs and explore in detail the rationale and methods for developing a new conceptual structure and multilingual terminological resource that focusses on priority pathogens and the diseases they cause. The ontology is made freely available as an online database and downloadable OWL file.

An experimental study for syndromic surveillance using OTC sales

Abstract: OBJECTIVES We analyzed the possibility of using sales data on over-the-counter (OTC) medicine in syndromic surveillance for early detection and/or prediction of influenza pandemics. METHODS Data who collected on daily November 2003-April 2004 sales of common cold medication commercially obtained from 600 pharmacies in Japan enrolled in reporting throughout the 2003/04 influenza season. OTC sales data were compared to daily influenza incidence data to determine correlations and predictability. Data included Sentinel Surveillance of influenza, National Surveillance of Dally Influenza Outpatients (Daily Case Reporting: DCR), and Mailing-List-Based Influenza Epidemic Database (MLflu). RESULTS The seasonal influenza epidemic peak for 2003-2004 was observed on January 30, February 1, and February 2 for sentinel surveillance, DCR, and MLflu. Sales peaks of OTC medicines occured twice in 2003-2004 season, once at the end of the year and once on January 27. Peak OTC sales for common cold medication per pharmacy were preceded by 18, 21, and 13 days for sentinel surveillance, DCR, and MLflu. OTC sales successfully explained 74-85% in the variation of influenza incidence which is interpretable as sufficient power of explanation. CONCLUSIONS OTC sales proved to be a good indicator of real-time surveillance for influenza epidemics. Further analysis on multiyear data is needed to demonstrate the robustness of results. To confirm the advantage in the system of real-time syndromic surveillance, it is also necessary to check explanatory power of OTC sales on the variation of influenza incidence with prospective datasets.