Early epidemic detection from Google Flu Trends (opens in new tab)

(dritte.org)

24 pointsumar_saif13y ago7 comments

7 comments

7 comments · 5 top-level

umar_saifOP13y ago· 2 in thread

Joe Google Flu Trends is pretty good at tracking geo-mapped disease trends. They track all related queries (symptoms, drugs, treatments etc). Take a look at the nature paper they wrote in 2008: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature0... . The trend are fairly nicely correlated with CDC data. Our system takes these trends and convert them into epidemic alerts.

Pwnguinz13y ago

Supposedly, San Francisco has reached "Epidemic" scale in flu outbreaks... How is that categorized? What's considered an epidemic? I live in San Francisco and have yet to notice any peers with the flu.

mansoorpervaiz13y ago

Hi, the whole point of the system is to determine early if there is an outbreak. So that the health officials can take pre-emptive measures well before we reach a point where you start seeing sick people around you. If you can see people with flu like symptoms around you then there is no need for the system as you, yourself can tell that it is an Epidemic. An epidemic means higher number of patients with Flu like symptoms than there should be in a particular time period. The system caters for seasonal increase in the number of patients.

umar_saifOP13y ago

Google Flu trends (Nature, Aug'08) tracks the query volume of the symptoms of a disease like Flu; its a pretty neat idea, especially for countries that do not have a CDC-scale disease surveillance system. An important question is whether/how such a surveillance method can be used for early epidemic detection.

In our work, we augmented the capabilities of Google Flu Trends by evaluating algorithms that can translate the raw search query volume produced by this service into actionable alerts and developed Flubreaks, a live system that uses Flu Trends data: http://dritte.org/flubreaks/

JoeAltmaier13y ago

News reports in Hong Kong can result in queries in Louisiana. Not sure there is a geo-location link between Google queries and symptoms experienced.

How about queries regarding drug store locations or treatments? That might translate to geography. Or maybe that's already what they do?

IbrahimGhaznavi13y ago

Great work !!

This system has full potential to help the masses.

rm99913y ago

Is there a way to get a notification if your region is trending?

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