A flexibly shaped space-time scan statistic for disease outbreak detection and monitoring

Background  

Early detection of disease outbreaks enables public health officials to implement disease control and prevention measures at the earliest possible time. A time periodic geographical disease surveillance system based on a cylindrical space-time scan statistic has been used extensively for disease surveillance along with the SaTScan software. In the purely spatial setting, many different methods have been proposed to detect spatial disease clusters. In particular, some spatial scan statistics are aimed at detecting irregularly shaped clusters which may not be detected by the circular spatial scan statistic.