Application of Big Data Technology for COVID-19 Prevention and Control in China: Lessons and Recommendations

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Abstract

Background

In the prevention and control of infectious diseases, previous research on the application of big data technology has mainly focused on the early warning and early monitoring of infectious diseases. Although the application of big data technology for COVID-19 warning and monitoring remain important tasks, prevention of the disease’s rapid spread and reduction of its impact on society are currently the most pressing challenges for the application of big data technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, the Chinese government and nongovernmental organizations actively used big data technology to prevent, contain, and control the spread of COVID-19.

Objective

The aim of this study is to discuss the application of big data technology to prevent, contain, and control COVID-19 in China; draw lessons; and make recommendations.

Methods

We discuss the data collection methods and key data information that existed in China before the outbreak of COVID-19 and how these data contributed to the prevention and control of COVID-19. Next, we discuss China’s new data collection methods and new information assembled after the outbreak of COVID-19. Based on the data and information collected in China, we analyzed the application of big data technology from the perspectives of data sources, data application logic, data application level, and application results. In addition, we analyzed the issues, challenges, and responses encountered by China in the application of big data technology from four perspectives: data access, data use, data sharing, and data protection. Suggestions for improvements are made for data collection, data circulation, data innovation, and data security to help understand China’s response to the epidemic and to provide lessons for other countries’ prevention and control of COVID-19.

Results

In the process of the prevention and control of COVID-19 in China, big data technology has played an important role in personal tracking, surveillance and early warning, tracking of the virus’s sources, drug screening, medical treatment, resource allocation, and production recovery. The data used included location and travel data, medical and health data, news media data, government data, online consumption data, data collected by intelligent equipment, and epidemic prevention data. We identified a number of big data problems including low efficiency of data collection, difficulty in guaranteeing data quality, low efficiency of data use, lack of timely data sharing, and data privacy protection issues. To address these problems, we suggest unified data collection standards, innovative use of data, accelerated exchange and circulation of data, and a detailed and rigorous data protection system.

Conclusions

China has used big data technology to prevent and control COVID-19 in a timely manner. To prevent and control infectious diseases, countries must collect, clean, and integrate data from a wide range of sources; use big data technology to analyze a wide range of big data; create platforms for data analyses and sharing; and address privacy issues in the collection and use of big data.

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Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks

Andre Esteva, Brett Kuprel, Roberto Chacón-Novoa … (2017)

Skin cancer, the most common human malignancy, is primarily diagnosed visually, beginning with an initial clinical screening and followed potentially by dermoscopic analysis, a biopsy and histopathological examination. Automated classification of skin lesions using images is a challenging task owing to the fine-grained variability in the appearance of skin lesions. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show potential for general and highly variable tasks across many fine-grained object categories. Here we demonstrate classification of skin lesions using a single CNN, trained end-to-end from images directly, using only pixels and disease labels as inputs. We train a CNN using a dataset of 129,450 clinical images—two orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets—consisting of 2,032 different diseases. We test its performance against 21 board-certified dermatologists on biopsy-proven clinical images with two critical binary classification use cases: keratinocyte carcinomas versus benign seborrheic keratoses; and malignant melanomas versus benign nevi. The first case represents the identification of the most common cancers, the second represents the identification of the deadliest skin cancer. The CNN achieves performance on par with all tested experts across both tasks, demonstrating an artificial intelligence capable of classifying skin cancer with a level of competence comparable to dermatologists. Outfitted with deep neural networks, mobile devices can potentially extend the reach of dermatologists outside of the clinic. It is projected that 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions will exist by the year 2021 (ref. 13) and can therefore potentially provide low-cost universal access to vital diagnostic care.

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Modified SEIR and AI prediction of the epidemics trend of COVID-19 in China under public health interventions

Zifeng Yang, Zhiqi Zeng, Ke Wang … (2020)

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak originating in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, coincided with chunyun, the period of mass migration for the annual Spring Festival. To contain its spread, China adopted unprecedented nationwide interventions on January 23 2020. These policies included large-scale quarantine, strict controls on travel and extensive monitoring of suspected cases. However, it is unknown whether these policies have had an impact on the epidemic. We sought to show how these control measures impacted the containment of the epidemic. Methods We integrated population migration data before and after January 23 and most updated COVID-19 epidemiological data into the Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed (SEIR) model to derive the epidemic curve. We also used an artificial intelligence (AI) approach, trained on the 2003 SARS data, to predict the epidemic. Results We found that the epidemic of China should peak by late February, showing gradual decline by end of April. A five-day delay in implementation would have increased epidemic size in mainland China three-fold. Lifting the Hubei quarantine would lead to a second epidemic peak in Hubei province in mid-March and extend the epidemic to late April, a result corroborated by the machine learning prediction. Conclusions Our dynamic SEIR model was effective in predicting the COVID-19 epidemic peaks and sizes. The implementation of control measures on January 23 2020 was indispensable in reducing the eventual COVID-19 epidemic size.

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Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential

Wullianallur Raghupathi, Viju Raghupathi (2014)

Objective To describe the promise and potential of big data analytics in healthcare. Methods The paper describes the nascent field of big data analytics in healthcare, discusses the benefits, outlines an architectural framework and methodology, describes examples reported in the literature, briefly discusses the challenges, and offers conclusions. Results The paper provides a broad overview of big data analytics for healthcare researchers and practitioners. Conclusions Big data analytics in healthcare is evolving into a promising field for providing insight from very large data sets and improving outcomes while reducing costs. Its potential is great; however there remain challenges to overcome.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Jian Wang:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6596-0684

Dong Fureng Institute of Economic and Social DevelopmentWuhan UniversityNo.54 Dongsi Lishi Hutong, Dongcheng DistrictBeijing, 100010China86 1386415713500032954@whu.edu.cn

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Med Internet Res

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Med Internet Res

Journal ID (publisher-id): JMIR

Title: Journal of Medical Internet Research

Publisher: JMIR Publications (Toronto, Canada )

ISSN (Print): 1439-4456

ISSN (Electronic): 1438-8871

Publication date Collection: October 2020

Publication date (Electronic): 9 October 2020

Publication date PMC-release: 9 October 2020

Volume: 22

Issue: 10

Electronic Location Identifier: e21980

Affiliations

[1 ] Dong Fureng Institute of Economic and Social Development Wuhan University Wuhan China

[2 ] Dong Fureng Institute of Economic and Social Development Wuhan University Beijing China

[3 ] Australian National Institute of Management and Commerce Sydney Australia

[4 ] Newcastle Business School University of Newcastle Newcastle Australia

[5 ] School of Management University of Liverpool Liverpool United Kingdom

Author notes

Corresponding Author: Jian Wang 00032954@ 123456whu.edu.cn

Author information

Jun Wu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3986-6923

Jian Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6596-0684

Stephen Nicholas https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6770-7105

Elizabeth Maitland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1551-4787

Qiuyan Fan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4717-4916

Article

Publisher ID: v22i10e21980

DOI: 10.2196/21980

PMC ID: 7561444

PubMed ID: 33001836

SO-VID: 2a37e28e-2f85-48be-9cb8-c1d880cd3b90

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

History

Date received : 30 June 2020

Date revision requested : 16 July 2020

Date revision received : 28 July 2020

Date accepted : 14 September 2020

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