Data Mining and GIS Spatial Analysis to Study Epidemiological Trends in Asthma

University Of Louisville Research Foundation Inc, Louisville KY

Investigators

Abstract

Medical geography is an interdisciplinary collaboration between geography and medicine to apply geographic methods to study disease distributions using the geographical information systems (GIS) containing information that can be cross-linked to hospital and county health data to examine the relationship between chronic diseases such as cancer and asthma and air quality and other environmental hazards. Substantial environmental data are currently available in the GIS, but the data are underutilized in investigating chronic health problems. Local hospitals provide emergency treatment for asthma for patients and patient addresses can be cross-linked to geographic information. Health data can be correlated to the geographic information to determine the relationships between air and water quality, and asthma emergencies. Standard statistical methods cannot be readily applied to the complex, observational data. Therefore, the analysis will use data mining techniques, including artificial neural networks, visualization, and kernel density estimation. Structural equation modeling examines the causal flow. The investigator will work with geographers in the Department of Geography/Geosciences and with health researchers to expand skills to include knowledge of the GIS system and software, and to use those skills to examine the epidemiology of chronic diseases related to environmental factors. The methods studied can be applied to many chronic diseases. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).