Geo-Spatial Disease Clustering for Public Health Decision Making

An explosion of interest has been observed in disease mapping with the developments in advanced spatial statistics, data visualization and geographic information system (GIS) technologies. This technique is known as "Geo-Spatial Disease Clustering," mainly used for visualization and future disease expansion prediction. Its importance has been overwhelmingly observed since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Government, Medical Institutes, and other medical practices gather large amounts of data from surveys and other sources. This data is in the form of notes, databases, spread sheets and text data files. Mostly this information is in the form of feedback from different groups like age group, gender, provider (doctors), region, etc. Incorporating such heterogeneous nature of data is quite challenging task. In this regard, variety of techniques and algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but their effectiveness varies due to data types, volume, format and structure of data and disease of interest. Mostly, the techniques are confined to a specific data type. To overcome this issue, in this research, a data visualization technique combined with data warehousing and GIS for disease mapping is proposed. This includes data cleansing, data fusion, data dimensioning, analysis, visualization, and prediction. Motivation behind this research is to create awareness about the disease for the guidance of patients, healthcare providers and government bodies. By this, we can extract information that describes the association of disease with respect to age, gender, and location. Moreover, the temporal analysis helps earlier prediction and identification of disease, to be care of and necessary avoiding arrangements can be taken.