Abstract
The Global Rapid Identification of Threats System (GRITS) is a biosurveillance application that enables infectious disease analysts to monitor nontraditional information sources (e.g., social media, online news outlets, ProMED-mail reports, and blogs) for infectious disease threats. GRITS analyzes these textual data sources by identifying, extracting, and succinctly visualizing epidemiologic information and suggests potentially associated infectious diseases. This manuscript evaluates and verifies the diagnoses that GRITS performs and discusses novel aspects of the software package. Via GRITS' web interface, infectious disease analysts can examine dynamic visualizations of GRITS' analyses and explore historical infectious disease emergence events. The GRITS API can be used to continuously analyze information feeds, and the API enables GRITS technology to be easily incorporated into other biosurveillance systems. GRITS is a flexible tool that can be modified to conduct sophisticated medical report triaging, expanded to include customized alert systems, and tailored to address other biosurveillance needs.
Highlights
Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health and economic stability [1, 2]
Identifying infectious disease outbreaks is critical to reducing overall harm and preventing epidemics
Using natural language processing (NLP) to systematically create structured data from unstructured text may enable the monitoring of innumerable local sources of infectious disease information globally
Summary
Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health and economic stability [1, 2]. Traditional biosurveillance systems rely predominantly on local clinicians, laboratory technicians, and public health practitioners to identify infectious disease outbreaks. Without a vast network of healthcare infrastructure, traditional biosurveillance systems may not be sensitive enough to detect rare infectious diseases.
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