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. 2021 Jul 8;54(1):20.
doi: 10.1186/s40659-021-00343-5.

OUTBREAK: a user-friendly georeferencing online tool for disease surveillance

Raúl Arias-Carrasco #  1 , Jeevan Giddaluru #  2 , Lucas E Cardozo  2 , Felipe Martins  2 , Vinicius Maracaja-Coutinho  3   4 , Helder I Nakaya  5   6   7   8
Affiliations

OUTBREAK: a user-friendly georeferencing online tool for disease surveillance

Raúl Arias-Carrasco et al. Biol Res. .

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 3.7 million victims and it will cause more deaths in the coming months. Tools that track the number and locations of cases are critical for surveillance and help in making policy decisions for controlling the outbreak. However, the current surveillance web-based dashboards run on proprietary platforms, which are often expensive and require specific computational knowledge. We developed a user-friendly web tool, named OUTBREAK, that facilitates epidemic surveillance by showing in an animated graph the timeline and geolocations of cases of an outbreak. It permits even non-specialist users to input data most conveniently and track outbreaks in real-time. We applied our tool to visualize the SARS 2003, MERS, and COVID19 epidemics, and provided them as examples on the website. Through the zoom feature, it is also possible to visualize cases at city and even neighborhood levels. We made the tool freely available at https://outbreak.sysbio.tools/ . OUTBREAK has the potential to guide and help health authorities to intervene and minimize the effects of outbreaks.

Keywords: Epidemiology; Georeferencing; Outbreak; Pandemic; Surveillance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
General overview of OUTBREAK Tool. A Run section of the tool, where the user uploads the input file and inserts the title and brief description of the surveillance analysis to be performed. B Result section showing the dynamic interactive map generated after running the tool
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Different features available in OUTBREAK. A Calendar input-box to select the period of interest for surveillance. B Control menu of the video generated by the OUTBREAK. The user can rewind or fast-forward the animation, with further options to play, pause, restart, or share the video on social media or by copying its URL to the clipboard. C Line-graph animation generated while running the tool, showing the cases per day and cumulative cases for SARS 2003 and COVID-19 2020 outbreaks
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Zoom and color features. Example of surveillance of a hypothetical epidemic in San Francisco using OUTBREAK, using the car incidents dataset from the San Francisco Open Data Portal (https://datasf.org/opendata/). Some key features of the tool are illustrated, such as the use of different colors to show the studied cases, and zoom-feature to investigate particular cases and retrieve the information at a neighborhood, street or even at a single building level
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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