Global Health Monitor: A Web-based System for Detecting and Mapping Infectious Diseases

TL;DR

The Global Health Monitor is an online system that detects and visualizes infectious disease outbreaks from news stories, aiding public health monitoring through real-time geo-temporal mapping.

Contribution

It introduces a web-based platform integrating news analysis, geo-coding, and ontology-based knowledge for real-time infectious disease surveillance.

Findings

High accuracy in news classification and entity recognition.

Real-time monitoring of over 1500 news feeds.

Effective visualization of disease spread on maps.

Abstract

We present the Global Health Monitor, an online Web-based system for detecting and mapping infectious disease outbreaks that appear in news stories. The system analyzes English news stories from news feed providers, classifies them for topical relevance and plots them onto a Google map using geo-coding information, helping public health workers to monitor the spread of diseases in a geo-temporal context. The background knowledge for the system is contained in the BioCaster ontology (BCO) (Collier et al., 2007a) which includes both information on infectious diseases as well as geographical locations with their latitudes/longitudes. The system consists of four main stages: topic classification, named entity recognition (NER), disease/location detection and visualization. Evaluation of the system shows that it achieved high accuracy on a gold standard corpus. The system is now in practical use. Running on a clustercomputer, it monitors more than 1500 news feeds 24/7, updating the map every hour.