Informatics for companion animal surveillance

The objective of this project is to employ computer technologies to describe and detect trends in enteric diseases and antimicrobial resistance. A data extraction program has been developed and installed on the computers at twelve sentinel companion animal practices in and around Calgary. The program automatically extracts, transforms and exports the desired fields to an external data warehouse. Using natural language methodologies the data will automatically be encoded to extract the cases of infectious enteric disease from the files. Descriptive and analytical epidemiology will characterize infectious enteric disease in Calgary pets and to detect patterns and clusters in space and time of enteric disease. To examine the relevance of the information from pets for human health and public health, the patterns of enteric disease seen in pets will be compared to human enteric disease laboratory submissions and evaluated for similarities in space, time, etiologies and antimicrobial resistance patterns.

Faculty Supervisor:

Sylvia Checkley

Student:

Partner:

AQL Management Consulting Inc

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Calgary

Program: