The ISDS 2010 conference will accept oral presentation, panel, and poster submissions in the following four themes. Topics that address the conference theme (enhancing the synergy between research, informatics, and practice in public health) and international surveillance and collaboration are especially encouraged.
Analytics/Research Methodologies
This theme is focused on important and novel advances in the field of surveillance methodologies and analytical approaches. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Statistical methods and tools for analyzing and interpreting data
- Integrating evidence from multiple sources
- Analytic evaluation of surveillance components
- Decision support
- New algorithms and evaluation of existing algorithms for cluster and event detection
- Pattern recognition algorithms
- Estimating morbidity and impact
- Innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology
- Evaluation of algorithms and systems through epidemic simulation
- Integration of mathematical modeling and statistical analyses
Public Health Surveillance
This theme is focused on improving the daily processes of surveillance, outbreak investigation, management, and response. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Evaluation of surveillance systems
- Outbreak detection, characterization and outbreak management
- Case studies
- Situational awareness
- Integrating surveillance across multiple data sources
- Contact tracing and network analysis
- Messaging/risk communication (what to say to the public, politicians and media with syndromic systems alerts)
- Linking response with front line health workers
- Novel approaches to communicable diseases surveillance and reporting (e.g., notifiable conditions, MRSA, nosocomial infections)
- Borderless data exchange models (e.g. federated information sharing approaches)
- Legal/ethical issues in syndromic surveillance
- Surveillance in resource-limited settings
Applications of Methodologies to New Domains
This theme is focused on applying methodologies to broader domains beyond traditional infectious disease surveillance, including but not limited to:
- Surveillance of acute and chronic non-infectious diseases and environmental exposures
- Monitoring for injuries, cancer, chronic diseases, heat related illness, crime, drug overdoses, acute poisonings, adverse reactions, and mental health
- Veterinary surveillance of livestock and poultry, companion animals, and wild animals for zoonotic infections, including dead animal surveillance
- Exploring links between genetics and disease surveillance
- Food, plant, animal, drug surveillance
- Pharmacovigilance/product safety
- Surveillance after natural disasters
- Global climate change
- Use of novel data sets (e.g., internet, news, media) to support public health surveillance
Informatics
This theme will be split up into two subgroups. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Applications/Practice
- How clinical information systems can support public health surveillance efforts
- Advances in methods for classifying data
- Natural language processing
- Data visualization methods
- Leveraging Meaningful Use requirements for public health surveillance
- Vocabularies and coding schemas
- Architectures/ Integration/ Interoperability
- System descriptions of real-world solutions to challenging integration problems
- System architectures for limited connectivity environments and disaster surveillance
- Approaches to building interoperable surveillance systems with reusable and multi-use components from open source development and cloud services
- Data integration – acquiring, moving, storing, processing, coding, normalizing, and preparing data for analysis between systems
- System architectures for surveillance in low-resource environments
- System architectures to leverage HIE for public health surveillance