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Pierre Goovaerts

Pierre Goovaerts
BioMedware, Inc

PhD

About

259
Publications
89,916
Reads
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21,077
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 1993 - December 1994
Stanford University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 1997 - October 2002
University of Michigan
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
January 2006 - present
University of Florida
Position
  • Courtesy Associate Professor

Publications

Publications (259)
Article
Full-text available
Background: Social and Environmental Determinants of Health (SEDH) provide us with a conceptual framework to gain insights into possible associations among different human behaviors and the corresponding health outcomes that take place often in and around complex built environments. Developing better built environments requires an understanding of...
Book
This text fulfils a need for an advanced-level work covering both the theory and application of geostatistics. It covers the most important areas of geostatistical methodology, introducing tools for description, quantitative modelling of spatial continuity, spatial prediction, and assessment of local uncertainty and stochastic simulation. It also d...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes a geostatistical approach to model and visualize the space–time distribution of groundwater contaminants. It is illustrated using data from one of the world’s largest plume of trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination, extending over 23 km2, which has polluted drinking water wells in northern Michigan. A total of 613 TCE concentrat...
Article
Full-text available
This paper addresses two common challenges in analyzing spatial epidemiological data, specifically disease incidence rates recorded over small areas: filtering noise caused by small local population sizes and deriving estimates at different spatial scales. Geostatistical techniques, including Poisson kriging (PK), have been used to address these is...
Article
Full-text available
Following the Flint drinking water crisis, a service line (SL) replacement program was implemented to replace lead SLs and galvanized SLs connecting residences to Flint's water system, leading to the excavation and inspection over a 5‐year period (2016–2020) of a total of 26,750 lines, representing close to 50% of all tax parcels in the City of Fli...
Article
Full-text available
Over 80% of lung cancer incidence in the USA has been linked with smoking, yet causes of lung cancer mortality (LCM) are more complex and have been linked with a range of cultural, environmental, economic and health, lifestyle variables. These all vary spatially yet spatial studies of lung cancer are rare. This paper investigates spatial patterns i...
Article
When, in the winter of 1994, under the supervision of my postdoc adviser André Journel, I started writing Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation in the bedroom of a tiny Palo Alto apartment, little did I know that 25 years later I would be conducting National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research on medical geostatistics from a lakefro...
Article
Despite several environmental crises, little research has been conducted on citywide geospatial modeling of water lead levels (WLL) in public distribution systems. This paper presents the first application of multivariate geostatistics to lead in drinking water within a distribution system, specifically in Flint, Michigan. One of the key features o...
Chapter
The drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan has attracted national attention since extreme levels of lead were recorded following a switch in water supply that resulted in water with high chloride and no corrosion inhibitor flowing through the aging Flint water distribution system. Since Flint returned to its original source of drink...
Article
Full-text available
Productivity is very dependent on the environmental and biotic factors present at the site where the forest species of interest is present. Forest site productivity is usually assessed using empirical models applied to inventory data providing discrete predictions. While the use of GIS-based models enables building a site productivity distribution...
Article
In the aftermath of Flint drinking water crisis, most US cities have been scrambling to locate all lead service lines (LSLs) in their water supply systems. This information, which is most often inaccurate or lacking, is critical to assess compliance with the Lead and Copper Rule and to plan the replacement of lead and galvanized service lines (GSLs...
Article
Full-text available
Cranberries are grown in sensitive wetland ecosystems and precision farming could be beneficial to reduce agro-chemical pollution and increase production without expanding area. Precision farming requires knowledge of the variation of yield within-fields but cranberry harvesting methods produce only one yield value per field unless an expensive pre...
Article
Full-text available
As the volume, accuracy and precision of digital geographic informationhave increased, concerns regarding individual privacy and confidentiality havecome to the forefront. Not only do these challenge a basic tenet underlying theadvancement of science by posing substantial obst acles to the sharing of data tovalidate research results, but they are ob...
Article
The delay in reporting high levels of lead in Flint drinking water, following the city's switch to the Flint River as its water supply, was partially caused by the biased selection of sampling sites away from the lead pipe network. Since Flint returned to its pre-crisis source of drinking water, the State has been monitoring water lead levels (WLL)...
Chapter
Full-text available
Sample support generally refers to the length, area, or volume associated with a measurement or observation. The term originates in the field of geostatistics, primarily from mining applications. To appreciate the issues associated with this term, this entry provides (i) a more complete definition of sample support as used in geostatistics; (ii) a...
Article
Full-text available
To examine the association of major types of comorbidity with late-stage prostate cancer, a random sample of 11,083 men diagnosed with prostate cancer during 2002-2007 was taken from the Florida Cancer Data System. Individual-level covariates included demographics, primary insurance payer, and comorbidity following the Elixhauser Index. Socioeconom...
Article
Dolines or sinkholes are earth depressions that develop in soluble rocks complexes such as limestone, dolomite, gypsum, anhydrite, and halite; dolines appear in a variety of shapes from nearly circular to complex structures with highly curved perimeters. The occurrence of dolines in the studied karst area is not random; they are the results of geom...
Article
This paper describes a multivariate geostatistical methodology to delineate areas of potential interest for future sedimentary gold exploration, with an application to an abandoned sedimentary gold mining region in Portugal. The main challenge was the existence of only a dozen gold measurements confined to the grounds of the old gold mines, which p...
Article
The method of harvesting cranberries gives just one yield value per field so characterizing within-field variation is difficult. Geostatistical disaggregation of per field yield totals using the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) from imagery as secondary information was investigated. Results were compared to within-field yield variability projected f...
Article
Individual-level data from the Florida Cancer Data System (1981–2007) were analyzed to explore temporal trends of prostate cancer late-stage diagnosis, and how they vary based on race, income and age. Annual census-tract rates were computed for two races (white and black) and two age categories (40–65, >65) before being aggregated according to cens...
Article
Objective: To investigate individual and contextual factors contributing to overall prostate cancer (PCa) survival in Florida. Methods: A random sample of 6,457 PCa cases diagnosed between 10/1/2001 and 12/31/2007 was extracted from Florida Cancer Data System. Comorbidity was computed following Elixhauser Index. Survival probability curve was ge...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper describes the mapping of gold content in the surroundings of abandoned gold mines located in central Portugal. In 1988, 376 samples were collected and analyzed for 22 elements. Gold (Au) was measured only inside the gold mines and its value was predicted at other locations using linear regression (\(\mathrm{{R}}^{2}=0.46\)) and four meta...
Article
Proceedings: AACR Annual Meeting 2014; April 5-9, 2014; San Diego, CA Background: Few studies have looked at the independent contribution that individual-level and contextual factors make to prostate cancer survival. The objective of this study was to identify individual and contextual factors contributing to overall prostate cancer survival in Fl...
Chapter
Sample support generally refers to the length, area, or volume associated with a measurement or observation. The term originates in the field of geostatistics, primarily from mining applications. To appreciate the issues associated with this term, this entry provides (i) a more complete definition of sample support as used in geostatistics; (ii) a...
Article
Since its development in the mining industry, geostatistics has emerged as the primary tool for spatial data analysis in various fields, ranging from earth and atmospheric sciences to agriculture, soil science, remote sensing, and more recently environmental exposure assessment. In the last few years, these tools have been tailored to the field of...
Article
Full-text available
To identify individual and contextual factors contributing to overall mortality among men diagnosed with prostate cancer in Florida, a random sample of patients (between October 1, 2001, and December 31, 2007) was taken from the Florida Cancer Data System. Patient's demographic and clinical information were obtained from the Florida Cancer Data Sys...
Article
This study assessed spatial context and the local impacts of putative factors on the proportion of prostate cancer diagnosed at late-stages in Florida during the period 2001e2007. A logistic regression was performed aspatially and by geographically-weighted regression (GWR) at the nodes of a 5 km spacing grid overlaid over Florida and using all the...
Book
Full-text available
This User Manual for SpaceStat Version 4.0 provides a comprehensive description of the software and how to use it. Check here for current pdf http://www.biomedware.com/files/SpaceStat_4.0_Documentation.pdf and here for software http://www.biomedware.com/?module=Page&sID=spacestat.
Article
Background: Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Although prostate cancer incidence and mortality have declined recently, striking disparities exist. Visualizing spatial and temporal trends of prostate cancer late-stage incidence, and how they vary based on...
Article
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer after skin cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death for American men, behind only lung cancer.1 The American cancer society estimates that there will be about 238,590 new cases of prostate cancer, and 29,720 men will die from the disease in 2013.1 Prostate cancer mortality rate is dec...
Article
A method was developed to categorize prostate cancer treatments for epidemiologic and outcomes studies. A total of 60,497 prostate cancer cases from the Florida Cancer Data System diagnosed between 2001 and 2007 were used. The classification has the following properties. First, the treatments classified in the same group are clinically comparable a...
Article
Analyzing temporal trends in health outcomes can provide a more comprehensive picture of the burden of a disease like cancer and generate new insights about the impact of various interventions. In the United States such an analysis is increasingly conducted using joinpoint regression outside a spatial framework, which overlooks the existence of sig...
Chapter
Full-text available
Sample support generally refers to the length, area, or volume associated with a measurement or observation. The term originates in the field of geostatistics, primarily from mining applications. To appreciate the issues associated with this term, this entry provides (i) a more complete definition of sample support as used in geostatistics; (ii) a...
Article
Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa, provides protected habitats for the unique animals of the African savannah. For the past 40 years, annual aerial surveys of herbivores have been conducted to aid management decisions based on (1) the spatial distribution of species throughout the park and (2) total species populations in a year. The surveys...
Article
Introduction: Identifying clinically relevant comorbid conditions might lead to effective control of prostate cancer- specific risk factors and provide opportunities to improve patient care and outcomes. There are challenges in assessing comorbidity using linked databases such as statewide hospital administrative data and state cancer registry. Th...
Conference Paper
Background: Screening and treatment of prostate cancer remain controversial while tens of thousands of men die each year from the disease. Purpose: To identify individual and contextual factors contributing to overall prostate cancer mortality in Florida. Methods: Using cases diagnosed with prostate cancer between 10/1/2001 and 12/31/2007 in th...
Article
A suite of techniques is introduced for the exploratory spatial data analysis of geographical disparities in time series of health outcomes, including 3D display in a combined time and geography space, binomial kriging for noise filtering, space-time boundary analysis to detect significant differences between adjacent geographical units, and spatia...
Article
Full-text available
Long- and short-term changes in the spatial distribution of surface water phosphorus concentrations were assessed for the Everglades wetland (USA) from 12 years of monitoring data. Changes in phosphorus spatial distributions, before and after implementation of measures to reduce phosphorus, including stormwater treatment areas (STAs) and best manag...
Article
The use of new, rapid and non-invasive sensors in the field allows the collection of many observations which are necessary to assess the spatial variability of berry composition. The aim of this work was to study the spatial variability in anthocyanin content in grapes and to quantify its relationship with the vigour and yield in a commercial viney...
Article
Background and Aims: The spatio‐temporal variability of phenol grape composition in a vineyard can be characterised by using precision viticulture tools. Characterising anthocyanin variation in grapes requires a large number of observations, which can be done by using proximal sensors in the field. This study characterises the dynamics of spatial‐t...
Conference Paper
Contamination of soil can have strong impacts on population health. Modeling these potential impacts is then an important issue of Digital Soil Assessment. Indeed, the quality of the health risk assessment strongly depends on the quality of digital soil contamination mapping. Thus, communicating about the risks should not be done independently of t...
Article
This article discusses options to allow comparative analysis of inequalities in the distribution of health workers ( HWs ) across and within countries using a single summary measure of the distribution. Income inequality generally is measured across individuals, but inequalities in the dispersion of HWs must use geographical areas or population gro...
Article
This study evaluated the risk factors associated with racial disparities in female breast cancer mortality for African-American and Hispanic women at the census tract level in Texas from 1995 to 2005. Data on female breast cancer cases were obtained from the Texas Cancer Registry. Socioeconomic and demographic data were collected from Census 2000....
Article
Legacy data in the form of soil maps, which often have typical property measurements associated with each polygon, can be an important source of information for digital soil mapping (DSM). Methods of disaggregating such information and using it for quantitative estimation of soil properties by methods such as regression kriging (RK) are needed. Sev...
Article
Full-text available
Although prostate cancer-related incidence and mortality have declined recently, striking racial/ethnic differences persist in the United States. Visualizing and modelling temporal trends of prostate cancer late-stage incidence, and how they vary according to geographic locations and race, should help explaining such disparities. Joinpoint regressi...
Article
Abstract:Disparities in prostate cancer diagnosis among racial/ethnic groups and across Florida were mapped for the period 1996-2002 and their relationship with putative factors (individual, census tract and county level) was investigated using multilevel modeling and contingency analysis. More counties had higher rates of late-stage diagnosis for...
Article
Information available for mapping continuous soil attributes often includes point field data and choropleth maps (e.g. soil or geological maps) that model the spatial distribution of soil attributes as the juxtaposition of polygons (areas) with constant values. This paper presents two approaches to incorporate both point and areal data in the spati...
Article
This paper presents alternative implementations of boundary analysis to: (1) quantify rate changes across boundaries both in an absolute (rate difference) and relative (rate ratio) ways, (2) detect changes of a minimum magnitude by using a null hypothesis of non-uniform risk, (3) account for spatial patterns and population sizes in the randomizatio...
Chapter
Full-text available
Geostatistical spatio-temporal models provide a probabilistic framework for data analysis and predictions that build on the joint spatial and temporal dependence between observations. Since its original development in the mining industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the geostatistical approach has been adopted in many disciplines, such as env...
Article
Epidemiologic analyses traditionally rely on point estimates of exposure for assessing risk despite exposure error. We present a strategy that produces a range of risk estimates reflecting distributions of individual-level exposure. Quantitative estimates of exposure and its associated error are used to create for each individual a normal distribut...
Article
Blackwater streams are found throughout the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States and are characterized by a series of instream floodplain swamps that play a critical role in determining the water quality of these systems. Within the state of Georgia, many of these streams are listed in violation of the state's dissolved oxygen (DO) stand...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper investigates the potential of indicator and Poisson kriging for populating gaps in aerial transect surveys of herbivore species abundance in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Indicator kriging does not perform well due to a lack of zero counts in the raw observations and due to poor variogram structure for rare large counts. Two Poisso...
Article
Full-text available
This paper investigates the impact of geographic scale (census tract, zip code, and county) on the detection of disparities in breast cancer mortality among three ethnic groups in Texas (period 1995-2005). Racial disparities were quantified using both relative (RR) and absolute (RD) statistics that account for the population size and correct for un...
Chapter
Full-text available
Cranberries are harvested by flooding the field and agitating vines so the fruit, which float can be skimmed from the surface and loaded into barrels. This harvesting method makes application of standard precision farming practices difficult. This paper investigates the potential of combining Area-to-Area (AtoA) and Area-to-Point (AtoP) kriging of...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper presents an overview of geostatistical methods available for the analysis of both areal and individual-level health data. The application of Poisson kriging and p-field simulation to lung cancer mortality rates recorded for white males in 688 US counties of the Southeast (1970–1994) allowed: (1) the creation of noise-filtered mortality m...
Article
A common issue in spatial interpolation is the combination of data measured over different spatial supports. For example, information available for mapping disease risk typically includes point data (e.g. patients' and controls' residence) and aggregated data (e.g. socio-demographic and economic attributes recorded at the census track level). Simil...
Article
We examined the impact of temporal dependence between patterns of error in classified time-series imagery through a simulation modeling approach. This research extended the land-cover-change simulation model we previously developed to investigate: (1) the assumption of temporal independence between patterns of error in classified time-series imager...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Arsenic in drinking water has been linked with the risk of urinary bladder cancer, but the dose–response relationships for arsenic exposures below 100 μg/L remain equivocal. We conducted a population-based case–control study in southeastern Michigan, USA, where approximately 230,000 people were exposed to arsenic concentrations between 10...
Article
Identifying the spatial variability and risk areas for southern root-knot nematode [Meloidogyne incognita (Kofoid & White) Chitwood] (RKN) is key for site-specific management (SSM) of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) fields. The objectives of this study were to: (i) determine the soil properties that influence RKN occurrence at different scales; and...
Article
Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed non-skin cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death for American men. Florida ranks second behind California for both incidence and mortality from prostate cancer in 2008. With the wide spread use of prostate specific antigen (PSA) and digital rectal examination (DRE), a larger propo...
Article
This paper describes the combination of three-way contingency tables and geostatistics to visualize the non-linear impact of two putative covariates on individual-level health outcomes and test the significance of this impact, accounting for the pattern of spatial correlation and correcting for multiple testing. The methodology is used to explore t...
Article
The analysis of health data and putative covariates, such as environmental, socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, or occupational factors, is a promising application for geostatistics. Transferring methods originally developed for the analysis of earth properties to health science, however, presents several methodological and technical challenges...
Article
Geostatistical methods have rarely been applied to area-level offense data. This article demonstrates their potential for improving the interpretation and understanding of crime patterns using previously analyzed data about car-related thefts for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 2000. The variogram is used to inform about the scales of variation i...