Data resources and sample applications for information analysis in CW and BW defense

This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The objective of this project was to identify representative problems in chemical warfare (CW) and biological warfare (BW) defense to which LANL`s information analysis capabilities can be applied. In particular, the focus was on methods for detecting the outbreak of diseases and predicting their evolution. The authors found that a number of disease models can be expressed in a common form, and that these models can be transformed in a way that allows their parameters to be estimated on-line in a computationally efficient manner. Using this technique, diseases could be tracked in an automated and cost-effective manner. However, the greatest needs in this area are epidemiological models that account for spatial and transport aspects of disease spread. Also, there is great potential for the mining of morbidity and disease data in order to identify similar cases that may indicate an emerging disease or an attack