GIS Software and capability

What is Geographical Information System (GIS)?

It’s actually a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. In Bioinformatics, GIS technology can be used for scientific investigations, environmental impact assessment, for example, allows planners to calculate response time in case of natural disasters or the geographical of cancer and other disease in human, animal and plant populations.

Examples of GIS in Bioinformatics

ETI Bioinformatics
Currently they are participating in 2 GIS projects funded by NWO, the Dutch National Science Foundation:

The Impact of Global Change on the Biological Diversity of the North Sea. Do invading species change the composition and function of the North Sea ecosystem?

Climate change and Indonesian coral reef biotas

For these projects, ETI is building databases, programming queries and preparing maps and map layers

SARS in Hong Kong
Researcher uses cartographic and geostatistical methods in analyzing the patterns of disease spread during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong using geographic information system (GIS) technology. They analyzed an integrated database that contained clinical and personal details on all 1,755 patients confirmed to have SARS from 15 February to 22 June 2003.

Cluster analysis. A series of 12 kernel maps based on date of symptom onset and accounting for a 5-day incubation period of SARS. Each kernel map shows the density of SARS patients adjusted for underlying population density (i.e., SARS infection rate per 1,000 population) on a prototypical day over 16 weeks, with darker zones emphasizing disease hot spots.

Conclusion

GIS can offer quantitative and statistical measures along with visualization tools to examine patterns of disease spread with respect to disease clusters. And so to help/assist researchers to do predictions on the spreading of the disease and monitor outbreaks. But there are still limitations to the GIS technique in outbreak investigation. Howe GM. 1963. National Atlas of Disease Mortality in the United Kingdom. London:T. Nelson. argued that mapping of diseases tended to expose the “where” but not “why there” of the outbreak.