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DTRA

The U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is funding multiple development efforts directed at enhanced platforms to support bio-surveillance analysts under their Bio-surveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) program. These efforts include well-integrated user interface systems and advanced algorithmic concepts to facilitate analysis of diverse, pertinent data sources including traditional bio-surveillance data sources as well as social media inputs. A central challenge in this development effort is a practical, effective, method to test these prototype systems. This presentation discusses a simulation-based testbed to allow quantitative evaluation of analytical methods through controlled injection of simulated outbreak-related information into test data streams.

Objective:

To develop a software toolset to serve as a flexible test environment for bio-surveillance systems by injecting controlled, simulation-based, data modifications into a variety of traditional and non-traditional bio-surveillance sources.

Submitted by elamb on

Presented on December 6, 2016

 

The following slides were presented at the Pre-conference workshop of the 2016 ISDS Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. This presentation provides and overview of the consultancy to bring together state and local public health departments, research partners, vector control personell, ISDS, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to discuss Emerging Arboviral Disease

 

Presenter: Sara Imholte Johnson, Arizona Department of Health Services

Submitted by elamb on

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has been funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop tools that enhance situational awareness in infectious disease surveillance. We have applied the concept of the surveillance window to the development of a cross platform app (SWAP). This app allows the user to place information on case counts or disease occurrence in a specific location within the context of a historical outbreak curve to help determine whether prevention or mitigation action should be taken. By placing a frame of reference for where a case count is during an outbreak (in the early, peak, or late stages) and indicating whether the unfolding events are still within a surveillance window that would allow for feasible control, the app provides enhanced situational awareness of a decision maker. This tool therefore increases the granularity of situational awareness available to any user in the global biosurveillance community.

Objective

The goal of this project is to develop a cross platform app that contextualizes incoming information during an infectious disease outbreak based on historical data. The app makes use of a surveillance window concept in order to support decision making. This effort is part of a larger project with the goal of developing reference tools and analytics to provide decision-makers with timely information to predict, prepare for, and mitigate the spread of disease.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

COMBS is facilitating analyst workflows and collaboration, greatly accelerating the management of a bio-event, effectively implementing new capabilities and technologies, and providing opportunities for a wide variety of organizations to contribute data and tools that support their own goals while supporting and governing the ecosystem collaboratively.

Objective

The goal of DTRA's Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) program is to significantly reduce the time required to identify threats to human health and respond appropriately. The Draper Team is developing the Collaborative Overarching Multi-feed Biosurveillance System (COMBS) for BSVE to revolutionize biosurveillance (BSV) capabilities. Analysts will benefit from rapid and thorough information access, as will local public health authorities and individual citizens.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

Anthrax is a widely distributed endemic infection in Georgia, affecting nearly the entire country. Many of the human cases that are annually registered are agriculturally acquired. Anthrax remains a public health risk due to active, resistant soil foci. More than 2,000 anthrax affected areas are registered in the country; around 10% of them are active. Recent reports have indicated an increase in the number of human cases as a result of contact with the environment, this is hypothesized to be due to expansion of affected foci, and this has raised concerns of the disease spreading to new areas. The control of anthrax foci is one of the main goals of the public health and veterinary service’s in Georgia. A surveillance program of anthrax foci across pipeline constructions in Georgia has been ongoing since 2003. Field trips are conducted by National Center for Disease Control and Public Health mobile teams to investigate each possible affected area across pipeline constructions.

Submitted by Magou on

The Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) is a biological and chemical threat surveillance system sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). BSVE is intended to be user-friendly, multi-agency, cooperative, modular and threat agnostic platform for biosurveillance [2]. In BSVE, a web-based workbench presents the analyst with applications (apps) developed by various DTRAfunded researchers, which are deployed on-demand in the cloud (e.g., Amazon Web Services). These apps aim to address emerging needs and refine capabilities to enable early warning of chemical and biological threats for multiple users across local, state, and federal agencies. Soda Pop is an app developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to meet the current needs of the BSVE for early warning and detection of disease outbreaks. Aimed for use by a diverse set of analysts, the application is agnostic to data source and spatial scale enabling it to be generalizable across many diseases and locations. To achieve this, we placed a particular emphasis on clustering and alerting of disease signals within Soda Pop without strong prior assumptions on the nature of observed diseased counts.

Objective

To introduce Soda Pop, an R/Shiny application designed to be a disease agnostic time-series clustering, alarming, and forecasting tool to assist in disease surveillance “triage, analysis and reporting” workflows within the Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE). In this poster, we highlight the new capabilities that are brought to the BSVE by Soda Pop with an emphasis on the impact of metholodogical decisions.

Submitted by Magou on

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), on behalf the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA; project number CB10190), hosts an annual intern- based web app development contest. Previous competitions have focused on mobile biosurveillance applications. The 2016 competition pivoted away from biosurveillance to focus on addressing challenges within the field of chemical surveillance and increasing public health chemical situational awareness. The result of the app will be integrated within the DTRA BSVE.

Objective

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory hosted an intern-based web application development contest in the summer of 2016 centered around developing novel chemical surveillance applications to aid in health situational awareness. Making up the three teams were three graduate students (n=9) from various US schools majoring in nonpublic health domains, such as computer sicence and user design. The interns successfully developed three applications that demonstrated a value-add to chemical surveillance—ChemAnalyzer (text analytics), RetroSpect (retrospective analysis of chemical events), and ToxicBusters (geo-based trend analytics). These applications will be the basis for the first chemical surveillance application to be incorporated into the DTRA Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE).

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact. NBIC serves as a bridge between Federal, State, Local, Territorial, and Tribal entities to conduct biosurveillance across human, animal, plant, and environmental domains. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts.

To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a variety of data sets, including open source information, to provide comprehensive coverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBIC Biofeeds is a digital tool designed to improve the efficiency of reviewing and analyzing large volumes of open source reporting by biosurveillance analysts on a daily basis; moreover, the system provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored feeds allowing NBIC to better meet the specific information needs of individual, interagency partners. The tool is currently under development by the Department of Energy (DOE), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and it is in a testing and evaluation phase supported by NBIC biosurveillance subject matter experts. Integration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) is also underway. NBIC Biofeeds Version 1 is expected to be fully operational in Fiscal Year 2017. 

Objective

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is developing a scalable, flexible open source data collection, analysis, and dissemination tool to support biosurveillance operations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its federal interagency partners. 

Submitted by Magou on

NBIC collects, analyzes, and shares key biosurveillance information to support the nation’s response to biological events of concern. Integration of this information enables early warning and shared situational awareness to inform critical decision making, and direct response and recovery efforts.

DTRA J9 CB leads DoD S&T to anticipate, defend, and safeguard against chemical and biological threats for the warfighter and the nation.

These agencies have partnered to meet the evolving needs of the biosurveillance community and address gaps in technology and data sharing capabilities. High-profile events such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the West African Ebola outbreak, and the recent emergence of Zika virus disease have underscored the need for integration of disparate biosurveillance systems to provide a more functional infrastructure. This allows analysts and others in the community to collect, analyze, and share relevant data across organizations securely and efficiently. Leveraging existing biosurveillance efforts provides the federal public health community, and its partners, with a comprehensive interagency platform that enables engagement and data sharing. 

Objective

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (DTRA J9 CB) have partnered to co- develop the Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE), an emerging capability that aims to provide a virtual, customizable analyst workbench that integrates health and non-health data. This partnership promotes engagement between diverse health surveillance entities to increase awareness and improve decision-making capabilities. 

Submitted by Magou on

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) fills the need for a practical forum and coordinating mechanism for collaboration among subject matter experts (SMEs) from stakeholder groups that may normally not interact but who, when brought together, enable innovative approaches to problems and solutions that are not possible by any one group alone. The objective of the Analytic Solutions for Real-Time Biosurveillance proj

Submitted by ctong on
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