SaTScan software is used widely in outbreak detection. It's free, flexible, and fast. However, it is somewhat cumbersome, in that access is primarily through a GUI. While this is probably best for occasional use, it does not lend itself to automated analysis, storage and re-use of surveillance results, or to methodological investigations of the properties of the methods implemented in SaTScan.
The rsatcan package provides access to the SaTScan computation engine from R. rsatscan makes it easy to run SaTScan programmatically and to capture all of the results generated in R objects for later analysis. In addition, the package provides tools for writing files in SaTScan-readable formats, so that data residing in R can be used as SaTScan input with minimum hassle.
Presenter:
Ken Kleinman, Biostatistics Center Director and Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School