Biomedical subjects

Hervé Chaudet

Publications and source records attributed to Hervé Chaudet.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Web services based syndromic surveillance for early warning within French Forces.

OBJECTIVES: Syndromic surveillance for early warning in military context needs a robust, scalable, flexible, ubiquitous, and interoperable surveillance system. METHODS: We have designed our surveillance system as a collaborative network of web services on the basis of a skill oriented decomposition of the overall task and a formal model of epidemiological events. RESULTS: The services (integration devices, epidemiologic receivers, information processing devices, GUI clients) are distributed in several locations in France and French Guiana using a secured network. CONCLUSIONS: This system is in operation since several months. It has already early detected two outbreaks before conventional surveillance systems.

Biological Warfare↗

PubMed2005

Extending the event calculus for tracking epidemic spread.

OBJECTIVE: The email reporting system has been recognized as a key tool for early warning of disease outbreaks and surveillance of emerging diseases. The aim of the work reported here was to develop a formal language for building an event-centered representation of outbreak histories, described by outbreak reports, which could be used for tracking the spread of epidemics. METHODS: The SpatioTemporal Extended Event Language (STEEL) we have built is an extension of the Event Calculus that is based on joint spatial and temporal location of event occurrences and structured conglomeration of events. This language allows us to represent and build aggregates of events, according to their spatiotemporal location. MATERIAL AND RESULTS: In a proof of concept study, this language was implemented in Prolog. A trial corpus of 35 outbreak reports from a PROMED-Mail diffusion list was hand coded in an experimental implementation of STEEL. The performances of this language were compared with three human experts during a question and answer task on this corpus. The experiment showed agreement between responses of the experts and the system. CONCLUSION: STEEL ensures the spatial and temporal location of event occurrence. The resulting representation is very close to the narrative. Further work must be made to develop a system capable of automatically modeling outbreak reports.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed2005

Distributed and Mobile Collaboration for Real Time Epidemiological Surveillance during Forces Deployments.

This paper presents a pilot project of a real time syndromic surveillance system in French armed forces for early warning of biological attack by mass destruction weapons. For simulating the situation of a theatre of operations and its organisation, an electronic syndromic surveillance system covering all branches of service in French Guiana (about 3,000 persons) has been deployed and connected to a surveillance centre in France. This system has been design taking in account a collaborative view of epidemiological surveillance and the mobility of forces in extreme conditions. Several kinds of hardware, from rugged personal digital assistant to desktop computer, and several telecommunication links, from PSTN to satellite data links, are used. This system allows a quick report of cases, which are georeferenced. In the first results, some problems associated with the human and the technical aspects have been reported, in association with some immediate advantages.

Disease Outbreaks↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Evaluating the use of a comprehensive pretravel database by travel medicine experts and novices for advice building.

BACKGROUND: The practice of travel medicine is particularly dependent on knowledge that must be continuously updated, and that can be found in professional electronic documents (PEDs), as specialized websites or comprehensive off-line databases. In this study, we show to what extent the use of a comprehensive pretravel database can compensate for a lack of knowledge in travel medicine during advice building, despite inexperience in using such systems. METHODS: Sixteen physicians, novices and experts in travel medicine, were solicited for building adequate recommendations about real cases of international travel with the help of a specialized PED. The physician's verbalizations, browsing in the documentation and final recommendations have been analyzed for the purpose of identifying and counting the requests addressed to the system and the informative elements in the recommendations. RESULTS: Novices make 2.5 times as many requests for information as experts (p=.0009), and look for a greater variety of information, specifically connected to health precautions (p=.0012), immunizations (p=.0001), health care resources (p=.0037) and climate (p=.019), whereas experts focus their requests mainly on health risks (64.81% of requests, p5.0009). The recommendations from the two groups included equivalent quantities of about 12 pieces of information, but experts used 92.34% of the information found in the documentation, whereas novices used 72.37% (p=.00005). The most used informative elements, whatever the expertise level is, are related to immunizations and health precautions, but experts include more information about health risks (p=0.017), drug characteristics (p=0.014) and chemoprophylaxis (p=0.026). CONCLUSIONS: The PED actually increases the novices' travel medicine expertise, and is particularly efficient for immunizations and health precautions. The PED helps a novice to build advice that is, on the whole, equivalent to an expert's in terms of nature, if not of quality. Implications for the benefits of comprehensive PEDs in the practice of travel medicine are discussed.

Clinical Competence↗