Fahui Wang

• PhD, City & Regional Planning
• Professor at Louisiana State University

High-quality cancer data are fundamental for public health research and policy, but cancer data for small geographic units and population subgroups in the United States are rarely available due to small-sample suppression rules, spatial coarsening, and data incompleteness. These limitations hinder high-resolution spatial analyses and precision publ...

This paper examines the travel behaviors of hand-foot-and-mouth disease (HFMD) patients in Nanchang City in central China. Based on the HFMD patients’ hospital visitation data from the Center of Disease Control (CDC) of Nanchang in 2018, a spatial network of patient-to-hospital trip flows is constructed. A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) autom...

Accurately identifying and analyzing cross-boundary regional cooperation remains challenging due to administrative constraints and data limitations. This study utilizes high-resolution human mobility data, network community scanning (NCS), and association rule mining to examine trans-provincial cooperation across 369 Chinese cities, leveraging Loca...

Excess commuting, defined as the inefficiency resulting from spatial mismatches between residential and employment locations, poses significant challenges for urban planning and transportation systems. This study uses big data from individual vehicle trips collected in Tampa, Florida, to quantify excess commuting more accurately than traditional zo...

The strategic placement of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS) is fundamental to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles and plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change. As an emerging public transportation infrastructure, balancing fairness and efficiency in EVCS deployment is essential. To address the challenge of optimizing both...

Open-ource GIS plays a pivotal role in advancing GIS education, fostering research collaboration, and supporting global sustainability by enabling the sharing of data, models, and knowledge. However, the integration of big data, deep learning methods, and artificial intelligence deep learning in geospatial research presents significant challenges f...

IMPORTANCE Patients often travel for cancer care, yet the extent to which patients cross state lines for cancer care is not well understood. This knowledge can have implications for policies that regulate telehealth access to out-of-state clinicians. OBJECTIVE To quantify the extent of cross-state delivery of cancer services to patients with ca...

Background: Social determinants of health (SDOHs) may affect children’s health and health behaviors. This study aimed to understand the relationship between health behaviors and SDOHs in a child population from under-resourced communities (i.e., Medicaid eligible or enrolled, overweight or with obesity [OWOB], predominantly Black or African America...

Reproducibility, replicability, and expandability (RRE) have emerged as fundamental concerns in the realm of scientific research and development. Wherein, devising effective solutions for RRE within geospatial analysis stands out as a particularly critical challenge that demands immediate attention. Although there has been an evolution from basic r...

Prior research has defined cancer service areas (CSAs) anchored by major cancer centers in the U.S., such as members of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI). Those CSAs have discrete boundaries and may not capture the increasingly interwoven cancer care markets. This is the first attempt to delineate possible overlapping CSAs. Speci...

PURPOSE Oncology outreach is a common strategy for extending cancer care to rural patients. However, a nationwide characterization of the traveling workforce that enables this outreach is lacking, and the extent to which outreach reduces travel burden for rural patients is unknown. METHODS This cross-sectional study analyzed a rural (nonurban) sub...

The Geospatial Analytics Extension for KNIME (GAEK) is an innovative tool designed to integrate visual programming with geospatial analytics, streamlining GIS education and research in social sciences. GAEK simplifies access for users with an intuitive, visual interface for complex spatial analysis tasks and contributes to the organization of the G...

Introduction: The complicated task of evaluating potential telehealth access begins with the metrics and supporting datasets that seek toevaluate the presence and durability of broadband connections in a community. Broadband download/upload speeds are one of the popular metrics used to measure potential telehealth access, which is critical to healt...

Equity in health care delivery is a longstanding concern of public health policy. Telehealth is considered an important way to level the playing field by broadening health services access and improving quality of care and health outcomes. This study refines the recently developed “2-Step Virtual Catchment Area (2SVCA) method” to assess the teleheal...

Telehealth has been widely employed and has transformed how healthcare is delivered in the United States as a result of COVID-19 pandemic. While telehealth is utilized and encouraged to reduce the cost and travel burden for access to healthcare, there are debates on whether telehealth can promote equity in healthcare services by narrowing the gap a...

This paper presents a new method for predictive crime hotspot analysis that further improves the kernel density estimation (KDE) method and the spatio-temporal kernel density estimation (STKDE) method by accounting for temporal crime cycles and is therefore termed the ‘cyclically adjusted STKDE (cSTKDE) method’. The case study on robbery incidents...

The purpose of delineating Cancer Service Areas (CSAs) is to define a reliable unit of analysis, more meaningful than geopolitical units such as states and counties, for examining geographic variations of the cancer care markets using geographic information systems (GIS). This study aims to provide a multiscale analysis of the U.S. cancer care mark...

This article examines the location choices of retail and service activities in Petrópolis, a medium-sized city in Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil. It uses the Multiple Centrality Assessment (MCA) method to measure centrality indices such as closeness, betweenness, and straightness, which capture the location advantage for each node being how close to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted unprecedented impacts on the world. Since its onset, China has established a network of fever clinics as an effective strategy to aggressively isolate and screen possible patients with COVID-19 symptoms. This study presents two fever clinic maps that visualize the uneven responses to the COVID-19 pandemic at the ci...

Purpose: Geographic access to cancer care is known to significantly impact utilization and outcomes. Longer travel times have negative impacts for patients requiring highly specialized care, such as for rare cancers, and for those in rural areas. Scant population-based research informs geographic access to care for rare cancers and whether ruralit...

This chapter outlines four methodological themes in spatial analytics with broad applications in social sciences and public policy, all grouped under the umbrella of “Computational Spatial Social Science”. Spatial accessibility measures the relative ease by which the locations of activities or services can be reached, and serves as a major matric f...

Defining a reliable geographic unit pertaining to cancer care is essential in its assessment, planning, and management. This study aims to delineate and characterize the cancer service areas (CSA) accounting for the presence of major cancer centers in the United States. We used the Medicare enrollment and claims from January 1, 2014 to September 30...

Background: Delays between breast cancer diagnosis and surgery are associated with worsened survival. Delays are more common in urban-residing patients, although factors specific to surgical delays among rural and urban patients are not well understood. Methods: We used a 100% sample of fee-for-service Medicare claims during 2007-2014 to identif...

Planning public services needs to promote equal access across geographic areas and between demographic groups. However, most location-allocation models emphasize efficiency such as minimal travel burden or maximal demand coverage while omitting the equality issue. This case study optimizes the emergency medical service (EMS) in Shanghai from a trad...

Since the Dartmouth Hospital Service Areas (HSAs) were proposed three decades ago, there has been a large body of work using the unit in examining the geographic variation in health care in the U.S. for evaluating health care system performance and informing health policy. However, many studies question the replicability and reliability of the Dart...

Objectives: Geospatial data and computing plays an important role in the era of big data and artificial intelligence(AI), and provides a dimension of social studies in term of ontological, methodological, and epistemologs aspects. Methods: This interview invited some influential scholars from the fields of sociology, geo⁃informatics, computing scie...

We propose a scalable agent-based crime simulation model based on the routine activity theory. It uses census data and time geography to create a synthetic population with residences and job locations, commuting schedules, and daily routines constrained by disposable time that are more representative than existing models. The time and location of c...

The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has expanded telehealth utilization in unprecedented ways and has important implications for measuring geographic access to healthcare services. Established measures of geographic access to care have focused on the spatial impedance of patients in seeking health care that pertains to specific transpo...

Purpose Spatial behavior of patients in utilizing health care reflects their travel burden or mobility, accessibility for medical service, and subsequently outcomes from treatment. This paper derives the best-fitting distance decay function to capture the spatial behaviors of cancer patients in the Northeast region of the U.S., and examines and exp...

Green space serves urban residents in various functions including promoting health, but the roles of different types of green space are unclear. A survey titled “Healthy Neighborhood” was conducted in Beijing from May to July 2019 to examine and compare the associations between three types of perceived green space (park green, public-square green a...

Constructing service areas is an important task for evaluating geographic variations of health care markets. This study uses cancer care as an example to illustrate the methodology, with the nine‐state Northeast Region of the USA as the study area. Two recent algorithms of network community detection are implemented to account for additional constr...

This study examines what socio-demographic and spatial factors explain the variation of public transit ridership in a medium-size city in southern U.S. – Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In order to gain a sharper spatial resolution in the analysis, the ecological inference method is used to disaggregate socio-demographic data from the census block group le...

Uneven distributions of population and service providers lead to geographic disparity in access for residents and varying workload for staff in facilities. The former can be captured by spatial accessibility in the traditional two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method; and the latter can be measured by potential crowdedness in the newly devel...

The nationwide tertiary hospital catchment areas, known as the Dartmouth Hospital Referral Regions (HRRs), were created based on the 1992–1993 Medicare data in the U.S., to reflect referral patterns of hospitals and hospitalization patterns of patients for specialized medical cares at that time. Nowadays, those outdated HRRs have still been chosen...

This research attempts to build a unified framework for distinguishing the spatiotemporal visit patterns of urban places by different social groups using mobile phone data in Harbin, China. Social groups are detected by their social ties in the ego‐to‐ego mobile phone call network and are embedded in physical space according to their home locations...

Estimating a massive drive time matrix between locations is a practical but challenging task. The challenges include availability of reliable road network (including traffic) data, programming expertise, and access to high-performance computing resources. This research proposes a method for estimating a nationwide drive time matrix between ZIP code...

Estimating a massive drive time matrix between locations is a practical but challenging task. The challenges include availability of reliable road network (including traffic) data, programming expertise, and access to high-performance computing resources. This research proposes a method for estimating a nationwide drive time matrix between ZIP code...

Predictive hotspot mapping plays a critical role in hotspot policing. Existing methods such as the popular kernel density estimation (KDE) do not consider the temporal dimension of crime. Building upon recent works in related fields, this article proposes a spatio-temporal framework for predictive hotspot mapping and evaluation. Comparing to existi...

Objective. To develop an automated, data-driven, and scale-flexible method to delineate HSAs and HRRs that are up-to-date, representative of all patients, and have the optimal localization of hospital visits. Data Sources. The 2011 State Inpatient Database (SID) in Florida from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). Study Design. A net...

Excess or wasteful commuting is measured as the proportion of actual commute that is over minimum (optimal) commute when assuming that people could freely swap their homes and jobs in a city. Studies usually rely on survey data to define actual commute, and measure the optimal commute at an aggregate zonal level by linear programming (LP). Travel t...

Based on the 1990-2010 CTPP data in Baton Rouge, this research analyzes the temporal trends of commuting patterns in both time and distance. In comparison to previous work, commuting length is calibrated more accurately by Monte Carlo based simulation of individual journey-to-work trips to mitigate the zonal effect. First, average commute distance...

Residential segregation recently has shifted to more class or income-based in the United States, and neighborhoods are undergoing significant changes such as commuting patterns over time. To better understand the commuting inequality across neighborhoods of different income levels, this research analyzes commuting variability (in both distance and...

Most existing point-based colocation methods are global measures (e.g., join count statistic, cross K function, and global colocation quotient). Most recently, a local indicator such as the local colocation quotient is proposed to capture the variability of colocation across areas. Our research advances this line of work by developing a simulation-...

Objective : Derivation of service areas is an important methodology for evaluating healthcare variation, which can be refined to more robust, condition-specific, empirically-based automated regions, using cancer service areas as an exemplar. Data sources/study setting : Medicare claims (2014-2015) for the 9-state Northeast region were used to deve...

This study examines spatial accessibility of primary care in the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area, Louisiana. Two popular accessibility measures are used: the proximity method focuses on the travel time from the nearest facility and the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method considers the match ratio between providers and populati...

The short paper provides an overview on how geographic issues have become increasingly relevant to public health research and policy, particularly through the lens of geographic information systems (GIS). It covers six themes with an emphasis on methodological issues. (1) Our health-related behaviour varies across geographic settings, so should pub...

This study uses six censuses (1953, 1964, 1982, 1990, 2000, and 2010) at the county level since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China to examine the changes of population density pattern in mainland China over time. Based on the Gini coefficient, the change of disparity in population density followed a “U-shaped” trend, i.e., decreasing...

In developed countries with decreasing fertility rates, the provision of public daycare and kindergarten (PDK) is considered to be an important policy for boosting national birth rates. Since PDK is free, its spatial accessibility becomes the most critical factor for parents in choosing the service. The study uses the popular two-step floating catc...

The famous ‘Hu Line’, proposed by Hu Huanyong in 1935, divided China into two regions (southeast and northwest) of comparable area size but drastically different in population. However, the classic Hu Line was derived manually in absence of reliable census data and computational technologies of modern days. It has been subject to criticism of lack...

Understanding patients’ travel behavior for seeking hospital care is fundamental for understanding healthcare market and planning for resource allocation. However, few studies examined the issue comprehensively across populations by geographical, demographic, and health insurance characteristics. Based on the 2011 State Inpatient Database in Florid...

This book presents GIS-based simulation, optimization and statistical approaches to measure, map, analyze, and explain commuting patterns including commuting length and efficiency. Several GIS-automated easy-to-use tools along with sample data is available for readers to download and apply to their own studies. Download address: http://faculty.cas....

The stunning disparity in population density between the southeast and northwest in China is highlighted by the “Hu Line,” a famous population demarcation line proposed by Huanyong Hu in 1935. This research seeks to uncover the underlying physical environment factors that shape such a contrast. Specifically, we propose a habitation environment suit...