Geostatistical software for health and exposure analysis

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall objective of this project is to develop the first geostatistical software to offer tools that are specifically designed for the analysis of health data (e.g., cancer rates), providing: description of spatial patterns of disease and identification of scales of variability, spatial smoothing and filtering to detect regional patterns and hotspots, spatial interpolation and stochastic modeling of exposure data, and the investigation and visualization of scale-dependent relationships between exposure and health data. Instructional materials will be developed to promote the use of this relatively new methodology among health scientists. Phase I of the project will: 1. build on a firm foundation of completed simulation studies to further demonstrate and evaluate the ability of geostatistics to accurately map underlying local- and regional-scale risk patterns and to investigate scale-dependent relationships among diseases and environmental factors; 2. conduct a requirement analysis to identify the optimal geostatistical methods and functionalities to incorporate in the software; 3. develop and test algorithms and a software prototype to evaluate feasibility of the proposed approach.