

Early epidemic detection from Google Flu Trends - umar_saif
http://www.dritte.org/flubreaks/

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umar_saif
Google Flu trends (Nature, Aug'08) tracks the query volume of the symptoms of
a disease like Flu; its a pretty neat idea, especially for countries that do
not have a CDC-scale disease surveillance system. An important question is
whether/how such a surveillance method can be used for early epidemic
detection.

In our work, we augmented the capabilities of Google Flu Trends by evaluating
algorithms that can translate the raw search query volume produced by this
service into actionable alerts and developed Flubreaks, a live system that
uses Flu Trends data: <http://dritte.org/flubreaks/>

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umar_saif
Joe Google Flu Trends is pretty good at tracking geo-mapped disease trends.
They track all related queries (symptoms, drugs, treatments etc). Take a look
at the nature paper they wrote in 2008:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature07634.html)
. The trend are fairly nicely correlated with CDC data. Our system takes these
trends and convert them into epidemic alerts.

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Pwnguinz
Supposedly, San Francisco has reached "Epidemic" scale in flu outbreaks... How
is that categorized? What's considered an epidemic? I live in San Francisco
and have yet to notice any peers with the flu.

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mansoorpervaiz
Hi, the whole point of the system is to determine early if there is an
outbreak. So that the health officials can take pre-emptive measures well
before we reach a point where you start seeing sick people around you. If you
can see people with flu like symptoms around you then there is no need for the
system as you, yourself can tell that it is an Epidemic. An epidemic means
higher number of patients with Flu like symptoms than there should be in a
particular time period. The system caters for seasonal increase in the number
of patients.

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JoeAltmaier
News reports in Hong Kong can result in queries in Louisiana. Not sure there
is a geo-location link between Google queries and symptoms experienced.

How about queries regarding drug store locations or treatments? That might
translate to geography. Or maybe that's already what they do?

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IbrahimGhaznavi
Great work !!

This system has full potential to help the masses.

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rm999
Is there a way to get a notification if your region is trending?

