%0 Journal Article
%T Dynamic maps: a visual-analytic methodology for exploring spatio-temporal disease patterns
%A Denise A Castronovo
%A Kenneth KH Chui
%A Elena N Naumova
%J Environmental Health
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1476-069x-8-61
%X The spatio-temporal dynamics of Salmonella infections for 2002 in the U.S. elderly were depicted via dynamic mapping. Hospitalization records were obtained from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. To visualize the spatial relationship, hospitalization rates were computed and superimposed onto maps of environmental exposure factors including livestock densities and ambient temperatures. To visualize the temporal relationship, the resultant maps were composed into a movie.The dynamic maps revealed that the Salmonella infections peaked at specific spatio-temporal loci: more clusters were observed in the summer months and higher density of such clusters in the South. The peaks were reached when the average temperatures were greater than 83.4¡ãF (28.6¡ãC). Although the relationship of salmonellosis rates and occurrence of temperature anomalies was non-uniform, a strong synchronization was found between high broiler chicken sales and dense clusters of cases in the summer.Dynamic mapping is a practical visual-analytic technique for public health practitioners and has an outstanding potential in providing insights into spatio-temporal processes such as revealing outbreak origins, percolation and travelling waves of the diseases, peak timing of seasonal outbreaks, and persistence of disease clusters.The interactions between human health and physical environments are complex, for they involve many interacting variables that are geographical, chronological, and demographical. A good understanding of these interactions can lead to better strategized preventions and policies. However, such understanding requires the ability to recognize, track, analyze and represent dynamic spatio-temporal processes [1,2].Infectious disease surveillance can benefit from the study of dynamic spatio-temporal processes through acquiring more information on three aspects: seasonality of the diseases, synchronization between diseases and exposures, and geographic distribution of diseases and
%U http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/1/61