Presented by Dr' Joseph Messina

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Applications of GIS - A Primer
Presented by Dr. Joseph Messina
Department of Geography Center for Global Change
and Earth Observations Michigan State
University June 28, 2006
Collaborators Dr. Ashton Shortridge, Mark Finn,
and Pariwate Varnakovida
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MSU-Geography and MDCH

• Geography Faculty
• Joseph P. Messina
• Ashton Shortridge
• Sue Grady
• RS-GISc Outreach Services
• Director Jessica Moy
• Sample Current Projects
• Certificate of Need
• Limited Access Areas
• Facility Placement

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Introduction

• Getting started
• Role of GIS in health research
• GIS data
• data sources
• data input
• export
• Integration
• quality
• Spatial relationships and health applications
• Commercial GIS
• Summary

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Geography and Health

• Geography is the context in which health risks
  occur
• Space is where we live
• Risk is a spatial (and temporal) phenomenon
• Geography expresses variability
• Inequalities in health outcomes
• Differences in exposure and susceptibility
• Geography provides a natural experiment
• Comparisons between areas undergoing different
  processes
• Geography is a proxy for time
• Comparisons between areas at different states of
  development
• Geography provides the framework for intervention
• Resources are allocated geographically

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Geography and Epidemiology
Geographical approaches
Long-term
Case-control studies
Broad-scale studies
Small-area studies
Cohort studies
Time-series studies
Panel studies
Short-term
Population
Individual
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What is a GIS?

• Geographic information systems are computer
  systems designed to capture, store, process and
  display spatial data
• GIS comprise the computer (including
  peripherals), software, data, and technical staff
• Data are organized by georeferencing (i.e. linked
  to some systematic form of spatial referencing)
• Geographic pattern and location analyses are the
  basis for inference and hypotheses generation

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GIS and Health

• Spatial data capture
• Spatial data integration
• Spatial data storage
• Spatial data query and retrieval
• Spatial data quality assurance
• Analysis of spatial relationships
• Modeling (in 2, 3 and 4 dimensions)
• Visualization

• Health mapping
• Cluster detection
• Exposure mapping and modeling
• Risk mapping and assessment
• Spatial analysis of associations between
  environment and health
• Scenario analysis

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Geography and the environment-health chain
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Geography and the health-environment chain
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Geographic Data Types
Spatial features representation

• Points (e.g. address locations, postcodes,
  chimneys, pollution monitoring stations)
• Lines (e.g. roads, streams, disease vectors)
• Areas (e.g. administrative areas, land use zones,
  exposure zones)
• Irregular (polygons)
• Uniform zones (single value) or gradient
• Regular Tesselation (grids)

The means of spatial representation is usually
the decision of the analyst, not an inherent
characteristic of the feature - e.g., zip codes
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Basic data structures for GIS
Tabular information (attribute table)
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Attribute Data Types

• Feature type
• Coastline, roads, administrative boundaries
• Classes
• Land cover type, road type, region name
• Relational
• Size, perimeter, distance
• Counts
• People, deaths, hospital admissions, vehicles,
  altitude
• Intensities (spatial)
• Death rates, pollutant concentrations,
  unemployment rate, average income, road density,
  slope
• Fluxes (between locations)
• Migration, traffic flow, dispersion rate

The type of attribute data conditions the spatial
data type and vice versa
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Sources of Data
One key to using any data in GIS is
georeferencing (i.e. link to location)
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