Background:
The early identification of influenza outbreaks has became a priority in public health practice. Alarge variety of statistical algorithms for the automated monitoring of influenza surveillance have been proposed,but most of them require not only a lot of computational effort but also operation of sometimes not-so-friendlysoftware.
Results:
In this paper, we introduce FluDetWeb, an implementation of a prospective influenza surveillancemethodology based on a client-server architecture with a thin (web-based) client application design. Users canintroduce and edit their own data consisting of a series of weekly influenza incidence rates. The system returnsthe probability of being in an epidemic phase (via e-mail if desired). When the probability is greater than 0.5, italso returns the probability of an increase in the incidence rate during the following week. The system alsoprovides two complementary graphs. This system has been implemented using statistical free-software (R andWinBUGS), a web server environment for Java code (Tomcat) and a software module created by us (Rdp)responsible for managing internal tasks; the software package MySQL has been used to construct the databasemanagement system. The implementation is available on-line from:http://www.geeitema.org/meviepi/fludetweb/.
Conclusions:
The ease of use of FluDetWeb and its on-line availability can make it a valuable tool for publichealth practitioners who want to obtain information about the probability that their system is in an epidemicphase. Moreover, the architecture described can also be useful for developers of systems based oncomputationally intensive methods.
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