Presented December 4, 2018.
The Webinar, Introduction of SAS Studio Basics to the BioSense Platform, will include overviews, summaries, tips, tricks, and examples across a number of SAS topics on the BioSense Platform. Some of these topics will include the BioSense Platform SAS Pilot background and summary, the SAS Studio overview and setup, neat SAS features, code examples, and how to perform an API call from ESSENCE.
Presenters
SaTScan is a program often used for space-time cluster detection. In order to run SaTScan, the data must be in a pre-specified text format. Once the input files are in the correct format, the typical user opens SaTScan, chooses the appropriate options, and runs SaTScan. The output from SaTScan consists of one or more text files with statistical and geographical information about the clusters. Errors in SaTScan often require re-extraction of the data into the specified text format.
When running SaTScan many times per day, as is commonly done in surveillance, it can be cumbersome to create all of the necessary data sets and run SaTScan. This is also true for any kind of evaluation of systems that rely on SaTScan for surveillance. In addition, the lack of graphical output, such as a map of the areas identified in the cluster, detracts from the utility of otherwise excellent software.
Objective
The purpose of this project was to create a SAS (SAS Institute, Cary, NC) interface for SaTScan which can be used to create the necessary input files, run SaTScan directly from SAS (without using SaTScan’s GUI), and to combine the output with geographic boundary files to create a single-page output containing a map and statistics describing the resulting clusters found by SaTScan.