Abstract
The purpose of this article is to introduce a new computer application designed to help medical personnel to monitor the spread of infectious diseases in Japan. Spatiotemporal analysis of disease activity is not only good for prevention of infectious disease outbreaks, but it is also good for control of outbreaks of infectious diseases. The Japanese infectious disease surveillance scheme was established to detect infectious disease outbreaks during their early stages. However, because current surveillance reports are presented as tabular formatted numerical data and simple charts, it is difficult to grasp a trend of infectious disease morbidity all over the country and/or a transmission between neighboring areas. We have developed a web-based data visualization system that makes surveillance data more comprehensible for medical personnel. The system's database currently contains weekly reports of influenza and 11 pediatric infectious diseases in the 47 Japanese prefectures from 2000 to the present, which amounts to approximately 300,000 cases. The main feature of the system is that it automatically generates animations or graphic images for visualizing spatiotemporal patterns of infectious diseases by using a Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and a Hypertext Markup Language Version 5 (HTML5) according to user's requirements.
