Track: Health Care
Peaks and Troughs: Space-Time Cluster Detection in Rare Diseases
Clive SabelThis paper addresses the issue of estimating an individual's exposure to environmental risk factors that can be implicated in the etiology of a disease. Following work in the Applications Prototype Lab at Esri in Redlands during a 1997 graduate internship developing an ArcInfo Version 7.1.1 demo, this paper reports findings arising from my Ph.D. research. Using ARC GRID software's Pointdensity function to produce Kernel surfaces of disease risk, we have taken data for the rare neurological disease ALS from the northwest of England and Finland to demonstrate how ArcInfo can be used in the field of geographical epidemiology to detect significant spatial patterning or clusters of disease.
Clive Sabel
University of Lancaster
Bailrigg
Lancaster, LA1 4YB
ENGLAND
Telephone: +44 1524 593732
Fax: +44 1524 847099
E-mail: c.sabel@lancaster.ac.uk