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Introduction
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July 2008 - July 2015
Publications
Publications (104)
Dengue fever is a vector-borne disease transmitted by the Aedes (Ae. aegypti or Ae. albopictus) mosquito, with a presence in more than 100 countries and a major cause of morbidity and mortality globally, particularly in the Americas. As an alternative to mosquito habitat control, international health organizations propose community empowerment meth...
Background
Public health organizations have increasingly harnessed geospatial technologies for disease surveillance, health services allocation, and targeting place-based health promotion initiatives.
Methods
We conducted a systematic review around the theme of space-time clustering detection techniques for infectious diseases using PubMed, Web of...
This study aims to assess the relationship between county-level fatal crash injuries and road environmental characteristics at all times of the day and during the rush and non-rush hour periods. We merged eleven-year (2010 - 2020) data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The outcome variable was the county-level fatal crash injury counts....
Background:
The number of deaths and people infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Brazil has steadily increased in the first few months of the pandemic. Despite the underreporting of coronavirus cases by government agencies across the country, São Paulo has the highest rate among all Brazilian states.
Methods:
To identify the high...
We are able to collect vast quantities of spatiotemporal data due to recent technological advances. Exploratory space–time data analysis approaches can facilitate the detection of patterns and formation of hypotheses about their driving processes. However, geographic patterns of social phenomena like crime or disease are driven by the underlying po...
Background
A substantial proportion of crash injuries occur during the rush-hour period. This study aims to assess the relationship between county-level road environmental characteristics and fatal road crash counts during the rush-hour period.
Method
We merged eight-year (2010 - 2017) data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. We limited t...
Annually, vector-borne diseases (VBDs) such as malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, and Zika are responsible for over one billion infections and one million deaths around the world. Many VBDs are showing an expanded range due to climate change, overpopulation, globalization, urbanization, and other factors. As a result, novel outbreaks are occurring...
Background
Anticoagulant therapies are used to prevent atrial fibrillation-related strokes, with warfarin and direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC) the most common. In this study, we incorporate direct health care costs, drug costs, travel costs, and lost working and leisure time costs to estimate the total costs of the two therapies.
Methods
This retr...
Geographic accessibility of health services is one of the key dimensions affecting health care access, utilisation and may impact population health. We analysed countrywide space-time accessibility to primary health services by private car and multimodal walk-ride-walk travel chains of public transport in Finland. The analysis utilises register-bas...
Purpose
Uncertainty is not always well captured, understood, or modeled properly, and can bias the robustness of complex relationships, such as the association between the environment and public health through exposure, estimates of geographic accessibility and cluster detection, to name a few.
Methods
We review current challenges and future oppor...
Aedes albopictus is a cosmopolitan mosquito species capable of transmitting arboviruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. To control this and similar species, public and private entities often rely on pyrethroid insecticides. In this study, we screened Ae. albopictus collected from June to August 2017 in Mecklenburg County, a rapidly growing u...
At the heart of spatial epidemiology is the need to describe and understand variation in population health. In this review and introduction to the themed issue on “Spatial Analysis and GIS in Epidemiology,” we present theoretical foundations and methodological developments in spatial epidemiology, discuss spatial analytical techniques and their pub...
Chronic exposure to arsenic-contaminated drinking water is detrimental to human health. We develop an autologistic regression model to evaluate if the geology, pH, and well depth can improve our ability to predict the presence of arsenic at and above detectable levels (≥ 5 µg/L) found in private wells. We use arsenic samples measured in private wel...
NDS is an interactive, web-based system, for the visualization of multidimensional neighborhood dynamics across the 50 largest US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1980 to 2010 (http://neighborhooddynamics.dreamhosters.com). Four different visualization tools are developed: (1) an interactive time slider to show neighborhood classification...
The first case of COVID-19 in South America occurred in Brazil on February 25, 2020. By July 20, 2020, there were 2,118,646 confirmed cases and 80,120 confirmed deaths. To assist with the development of preventive measures and targeted interventions to combat the pandemic in Brazil, we present a geographic study to detect “active” and “emerging” sp...
The importance of optimization of rain gauge stations locations is critical given that rainfall data is central to various water-related studies. As rainfall data has vagueness in nature, fuzzy set theory can describe uncertainties existing in rainfall data. In this paper, we develop a framework to rainfall network design that combines fuzzy concep...
Wine tourism in North Carolina (NC) has substantially grown, and it is critical to capture the underlying factors that influence individual decisions to visit wine regions, ultimately informing marketing strategies and tourism product development. We conduct surveys at NC wineries to identify factors that may influence attractiveness and barriers t...
Mapping the prevalence and spread of infectious diseases has never been more critical than during the COVID-19 pandemic. A plethora of web-based GIS dashboards have been created that incorporate basic GIS functionality; these dashboards have served as platforms for rapid data sharing and real-time information, ultimately facilitating decision makin...
Public water systems must be tested frequently for coliform bacteria to determine whether other pathogens may be present, yet no testing or disinfection is required for private wells. In this paper, we identify whether well age, type of well, well depth, parcel size, and soil ratings for a leachfield can predict the probability of detecting colifor...
As the threat of arboviral diseases continues to escalate worldwide, the question of, “What types of human communities are at the greatest risk of infection?” persists as a key gap in the existing knowledge of arboviral diseases transmission dynamics. Here, we comprehensively review the existing literature on the socioeconomic drivers of the most c...
Vector-borne diseases affect more than 1 billion people a year worldwide, causing more than 1 million deaths, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in societal costs. Mosquitoes are the most common vectors responsible for transmitting a variety of arboviruses. Dengue fever (DENF) has been responsible for nearly 400 million infections annually. D...
There are three steps towards implementing the divide-and-conquer strategy for accelerating spatiotemporal analysis: First, performing spatiotemporal domain decomposition: dividing a large computational task into smaller parts (subdomains) by partitioning the input dataset along its spatiotemporal domain. Second, computing a spatiotemporal analysis...
Long-term exposure to contaminated water can cause health effects, such as cancer. Accurate spatial prediction of inorganic compounds (e.g. arsenic) and pathogens in groundwater is critical for water supply management. Ideally, environmental health agencies would have access to an early warning system to alert well owners of risks of such contamina...
Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) affect more than 1 billion people a year worldwide, cause over 1 million deaths, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in societal costs. Mosquitoes are the most common vectors, responsible for transmitting a variety of arboviruses. Dengue fever (DENF) has been responsible for nearly 400 million infections annually....
The first case of COVID-19 in South America occurred in Brazil on February 25th, 2020. By June 7th, 2020, there were 691,758 confirmed cases, 36,455 confirmed deaths, and a mortality rate of 5.3%. To assist with the establishment of measures for the strategic planning to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, we present the first Brazilian geograp...
Aedes albopictus is a cosmopolitan mosquito species capable of transmitting arboviral diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. To control this and similar species, public and private entities often rely on pyrethroid insecticides. Insecticide resistance status and physiological traits, such as body size, may contribute to local patterns of a...
We present the first geographic study that uses space-time statistics to monitor COVID-19 in Brazil. The first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, caused by the contamination of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and quickly turned into a pandemic. In Brazil, the first case occurred on January 23rd, 2020 but was officially reporte...
Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a pandemic with 1,420,299 confirmed cases and 85,992 total deaths within the United States as of May 15th, 2020. As the number of cases continues to climb, detecting clusters of COVID-19 is critical to alleviate the strain on ou...
Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a pandemic with 1,420,299 confirmed cases and 85,992 total deaths within the United States as of May 15th, 2020. As the number of cases continues to climb, detecting clusters of COVID-19 is critical to alleviate the strain on ou...
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan City, China. The virus may cause novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in symptomatic individuals. Since December of 2019, there have been over 7,000,000 confirmed cases and over 400,000 confirmed deaths worldwide. In the United States (U...
Dengue fever (DENF), chikungunya (CHIK), and Zika are responsible for the majority of the burden caused by vector-borne diseases (VBDs); which are produced by viruses primarily transmitted by the Aedes mosquito. Aedes have become prolific in urban areas due to a combination of climate change, rapid urbanization, increased human mobility, and global...
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, and is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). COVID-19 is a pandemic with an estimated death rate between 1% and 5%; and an estimated
R
0
between 2.2 and 6.7 according to various sources. As of March 28th, 2020, there were...
Background:
Workers employed in the coal mining sector are at increased risk of respiratory diseases, including coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP). We investigated the prevalence of CWP and its association with sociodemographic factors among Medicare beneficiaries.
Methods:
We used 5% Medicare Limited Data Set claims data from 2011 to 2014 to se...
We determine the impact of residential mobility in the prevalence and transmission dynamics of sexually transmitted infections. We illustrate our approach on reported chlamydia infections obtained from the Michigan Disease Surveillance System for Kalamazoo County, USA, from 2006 to 2014. We develop two scenarios, one with fixed residential addresse...
This volume presents a timely collection of research papers on the progress, opportunities, and challenges related to the advancement of geospatial technologies for applications in urban health research and management. The chapter authors cover technologies ranging from traditional GIS and remote sensing technologies, to recently developed tracking...
The well-being of a population and its health are influenced by a myriad of socioeconomic and environmental factors that interact across a wide range of scales, from the individual to the national and global levels. One of these factors is the provision of health services, which is regulated by both demand and supply. Although an adequate provision...
Context
Socioeconomic and landscape factors influence mosquito abundance especially in urban areas. Few studies addressed how socioeconomic and landscape factors, especially at micro-scale for mosquito life history, determine mosquito abundance.
Objectives
We aim to predict mosquito abundance based on socioeconomic and/or landscape factors using m...
Understanding spatial and temporal characteristics of landscape patterns is critical in ecology, since human interactions with their natural environment can significantly impact ecological processes. The common approach to detect changes in landscape patterns is to evaluate the spatial and temporal variation of well known, established metrics. Exam...
Online mapping providers offer unprecedented access to spatial data and analytical tools; however, the number of analytical queries that can be requested is usually limited. As such, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) services offer a viable alternative, provided that the quality of the underlying spatialtheir data is adequate. In this paper,...
Climate change, urbanization, and globalization have facilitated the spread of Aedes mosquitoes into regions that were previously unsuitable, causing an increased threat of arbovirus transmission on a global scale. While numerous studies have addressed the urban ecology of Ae. albopictus, few have accounted for socioeconomic factors that affect the...
Monitoring and predicting crack propagation in rock using acoustic emission (AE) technology is integral to a variety of sub-disciplines in the geosciences. The utility of existing AE data, however, is severely limited by prevailing visualization techniques, which suffer from problems of occlusion. Here, we introduce a novel approach to visualize 3D...
Scholars are in agreement that the local food environment is shaped by a multitude of factors from socioeconomic characteristics to transportation options, as well as the availability and distance to various food establishments. Despite this, most place-based indicators of “food deserts”, including those identified as so by the US Department of Agr...
Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) infect over one billion people and are responsible for over one million deaths each year, globally. Chikungunya (CHIK) and Dengue Fever (DENF) are emerging VBDs due to overpopulation, increases in urbanization, climate change, and other factors. Colombia has recently experienced severe outbreaks of CHIK AND DENF. Both v...
Background:
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest food assistance program in the United States. Participants receive electronic benefits that are redeemable at a variety of food stores. Previous research notes that low-income neighborhoods often lack supermarkets with high-quality, affordable food.
Objective:
The fi...
School location problems are notoriously wicked to tackle due to the multiplicity of actors involved, the emotional value of a child’s education, and the sheer number of conflicting objectives and constraints. School capacity constraints are particularly challenging because they may well invalidate the desirable property that students be assigned t...
The analysis of spatiotemporal data has intrigued researchers as the confluence of space-time GIS and big data becomes an important theme in the domain of geographic information science. While spatial data analysis has been maturely developed, its extension to the spatiotemporal dimension--i.e., the study of spatiotemporal data analysis remains ina...
Allergic rhinitis (hay fever) resulting from seasonal pollen affects 15-30% of the population in the United States, and can exacerbate several related conditions including asthma, atopic eczema, and allergic conjunctivitis. In this paper, we reconstruct the dynamics of pollen concentrations across the Eastern United States at a very fine scale by i...
Natural habitats continue to dwindle due to a variety of natural and human-induced stressors. In response, sufficient land must be set aside for conservation to preserve long-term biodiversity. In this paper, we propose a bi-objective optimization model to form spatially cohesive nature reserves by minimizing the distance from habitat patches to th...
The exponential growth of available data has increased the need for interactive exploratory analysis. Dataset can no longer be understood through manual crawling and simple statistics. In Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the dataset is often composed of events localized in space and time; and visualizing such a dataset involves building a ma...
The field of spatial epidemiology has evolved rapidly in the past two decades. This paper serves as a brief introduction to spatial epidemiology and the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in applied research in epidemiology. We highlight technical developments, and highlight opportunities to apply spatial analytic methods in epidemiologic...
High-performance parallel computing outperforms desktop workstations for computationally demanding problem solving. Domain decomposition and spatial indexing are widely used to accelerate spatial search. A single index method for spatiotemporal data processing lacks retrieval efficiency for massive computation. Combining multiple indexing methods t...
Dengue fever is a vector-borne disease which spreads quickly under suitable conditions and puts certain segments of the population at higher risk, especially in developing countries. Prompt diagnosis of the disease is critical to (1) substantially reduce risks of morbidity and mortality and (2) prevent further expansion of an existing outbreak. Sui...
A dearth of direct field observations limits our understanding of individual mechanical weathering processes and how they interact. In particular, the specific contributions of solar-induced thermal stresses to mechanical weathering are poorly characterized. Here, we present an 11 mo data set of cracking, using acoustic emissions (AEs), combined wi...
Infectious diseases have complex transmission cycles, and effective public health responses require the ability to monitor outbreaks in a timely manner. Space-time statistics facilitate the discovery of disease dynamics including rate of spread and seasonal cyclic patterns, but are computationally demanding, especially for datasets of increasing si...
Background: Using a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approach, we examined travel time and distance and factors associated with them to access hospital care for children with spina bifida (SB).
Methods: This was a statewide, population-based study of Florida-born children with SB 1998-2007, identified by the Florida Birth Defects Regist...
High-performance parallel computing outperforms desktop workstations for computationally demanding problem solving. Domain decomposition and spatial indexing are widely used to accelerate spatial search. A single index method for spatiotemporal data processing lacks retrieval efficiency for massive computation. Combining multiple indexing methods t...
An increasing number of studies have sought to identify disparities or inequalities in the distribution of urban parks and green spaces. Results of these analyses have diverged considerably depending on the method used to assess accessibility. In this article, we revisit an increasingly popular technique, the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA...
Dengue fever is an arboviral disease typical of the tropics that can be life-threatening and if not controlled properly may result in an epidemic. The absence of an effective vaccine makes strategies to prevent the virus transmission the most effective means of control. The planning of such strategies, however, is difficult due to the constant move...
Accelerated processing capabilities are deemed critical when conducting analysis on spatiotemporal datasets of increasing size, diversity and availability. High-performance parallel computing offers the capacity to solve computationally demanding problems in a limited timeframe, but likewise poses the challenge of preventing processing inefficiency...
In this article, we evaluate the impact of positional and temporal inaccuracies on the mapping and detection of potential outbreaks of dengue fever in Cali, an urban environment of Colombia. Positional uncertainties in input data are determined by comparison between coordinates following an automated geocoding process and those extracted from on-fi...