Development of a web-based data visualization system to present infectious disease surveillance data.

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The Japanese infectious disease surveillance scheme has been established to detect infectious disease outbreak in early stage, to identify the causative viral strains and to rapidly assess related morbidity and mortality. Based on this schemes, information on infectious diseases are collected from assigned hospitals or clinics and distributed by print or by the Internet. Because the information reported on the home page is usually numerical data or simple graphic chart, it is difficult for medical personnel to grasp the trend of infectious disease morbidity all over the country. We have developed a web-based data visualization system which can automatically generate Flash animations or graphic images and can visualize time series and spatial shifts of case incidents of disease simultaneously.At this time, the information stored in the database system is data related to 47 prefectures in Japan and 21 administrative medical districts on the island of Hokkaido.This system can present the following three kinds of animation or graphic image:1) Flash animation simultaneously showing geographical and progressive changes in morbidity throughout the country.2) A three dimensional bar chart showing annual weekly series rates of occurrence in each prefecture.3) A map chart showing the morbidity of any arbitrary 4 consecutive weeks in Hokkaido.To make the surveillance scheme function well, it is important to provide a good representation of the data collected in compliance with users' requests. It has also been mentioned that two kinds of output are useful for monitoring the morbidity of epidemic disease: time series of incidents of cases and spatial spread of infectious disease incidents. Our system can visualize time series and spatial shifts of the case incidents of disease simultaneously as images or animations on the home page. We believe this makes infectious disease surveillance data more easily comprehensible for medical personnel.