Scientists at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency have started to develop a cloud-based tool that aims to help epidemiologists identify and analyze human and animal disease anomalies and issue warnings on pandemics, DoD News reported Monday.
Cheryl Pellerin writes the Biosurveillance Ecosystem is designed to provide visualized results and analyses on emerging infectious diseases through applications that work to collect and analyze data from various sources.
DTRA scientists Christopher Kiley and John Hannan told DoD News in an interview that the BSVE system is based on an open-source software and uses machine learning algorithms to identify variations in disease signals.
“The BSVE is designed to foster collaboration and data sharing but it uses a security model that provides for individual data sets and applications to be restricted to specific users, if necessary,” Kiley said.
DTRA’s joint science and technology office for chemical and biological defense partnered with biomedical software firm Digital Infuzion to develop a system prototype, Pellerin reports.
The BSVE tool is a joint program of DTRA’s JSTO-CBD office and the Department of Homeland Security’s national biosurveillance integration center.
