Dengue Spread Information System (DSIS)

This research project was conducted under my supervision at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), My students worked on this project under my guidlines and mentoring are: Karan Bhanot, Dominic Schroeder, Isaac Llewellyn, Nicholas Luczak. This research project was a part of the Xinformatcs course that I taught during Spring 2020 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Outcome of this project was published as a conference paper in ACM ICMHI ( International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics) in May, 2020 in Kyoto, Japan.

Download the conference paper here: Dengue Spread Information System (DSIS)

News article about this research project was published by RPI on Everyday Matters: Advancing Dengue Research During a Global Pandemic

Project Overview

Mosquitoes are responsible for transfer of many vector-borne diseases including Malaria, Zika and Dengue. These amount to 17% of the total infectious diseases across the globe, leading to a death toll approximately 700,000 annually. Dengue is a preventable viral infection transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. However, over the past 50 years, the number of dengue cases has increased by a whopping 30-fold. Every year an approximately 500,000 people are admitted with severe dengue, with an estimated 40,000 deaths. In several countries in south American continent and Asia, dengue is one of the leading causes of death. It is mainly found in tropical and sub-tropical regions, particularly surrounding urban and semi-urban areas. Historically, there has been an intensive increase in the number of dengue cases from 2000-2010 and, if adequately explored, essential information can be retrieved. Our work involves the development of the Dengue Spread Information System (DSIS), a geographic-health information system designed to highlight the spread of dengue cases in Iquitos, Peru, and San Juan, Puerto Rico from 1990 to 2013. The application is aimed at citizens, travelers, policymakers and researchers to analyze and interpret the change in risk factors leading to dengue outbreaks and develop essential early warning applications and policies to counter future dengue outbreaks. .

Most of the global dengue data is not publicly accessible over the internet. Hence, we decided to center the application around two cities whose dengue data was readily available. As a pilot study, we explored the two cities: Iquitos, Peru, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. After research, we concluded there were very few dengue information systems that provided a geographic view of the reported number of dengue cases and the causing risk factors influencing them in these two cities.

A heat map shown below describes how various risk factors are correlated with the number of dengue cases. The factors that correlated the most with the number of dengue cases include minimum temperature, average temperature, dew point temperature and specific humidity.

Correlation/Heat Map

Information System to Visualize the Dengue Cases

Displaying "Risk Factors" Information on a Marker on the Geographic Map.

Figure shown below shows the number of dengue cases in Iquitos, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico from Year 2000 July to April 2013