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Bio- Surveillance
Program Objective:
The goal of the Bio-Surveillance program is to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches. The key to mitigating a biological attack is early detection. Given the availability of appropriate medications, as many as half the expected casualties could be prevented if an attack is detected only a few days earlier than it would have otherwise been identified. For contagious biological agents, early detection is also clearly paramount. The Bio-Surveillance program will dramatically increase DoD's ability to detect a clandestine biological warfare attack in time to respond effectively and so avoid potentially thousands of casualties.
Program Strategy:
The Bio-Surveillance program is seeking to achieve its objective by monitoring non-traditional data sources such as animal sentinels, behavioral indicators, and pre-diagnostic medical data. Technical challenges include correlating/integrating information derived from heterogeneous data sources, development of autonomous signal detection algorithms, refinement of disease models for autonomous detection, and ensuring privacy protection while correlating widely differing data and sources.
Planned Accomplishments:
FY02/ FY03: The Bio-Surveillance program will leverage existing disease models, identify abnormal health early indicators, and mine existing databases to determine the most valuable early indicators for abnormal health conditions.
FY02/ FY03: The program will also develop techniques to determine the best way to differentiate “normal” outbreaks of disease from deliberate bio-terrorist releases.
FY02/ FY03: Enhanced automated privacy protection methods will be developed to assure the anonymity of records accessed by the data monitoring software.
FY02/ FY03: A prototype bio-surveillance system with appropriate military and commercial data will be constructed for a citywide area of military interest and demonstrated in a series of field experiments by injecting simulated biological event data into the real-time data streams of the testbed system.