Objective
The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is deploying a scalable,
flexible open source data collection, analysis, and dissemination tool to support
biosurveillance operations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its
federal interagency partners.
Introduction
NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease
events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives,
and minimize economic impact. To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a
variety of data sets, including open source information, to provide comprehensive
coverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBIC Biofeeds is a digital
tool designed to improve the efficiency of analyzing large volumes of open source
reporting and increase the number of relevant insights gleaned from this dataset.
Moreover, the tool provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored, electronic message
notifications in near-real time so that NBIC can share specific information of
interest to its interagency partners in a timely manner.
NBIC is deploying the tool for operational use by the Center and eventual use by
federal partners with biosurveillance mission objectives. Core functionality for
data collection, curation, and dissemination useful to other federal agencies was
implemented, and NBIC is incorporating custom taxonomies for capturing metadata
specific to the unique missions of NBIC partners.
Methods
NBIC intends to implement operational use of the capability in FY 2018. The core
components of the system are data collection, curation, and dissemination of
information deemed important by NBIC subject matter experts. NBIC Biofeeds has
captured information from more than 70,000 unique sources published from around the
globe and presents, on average, 9,000 new biosurveillance-relevant articles to users
each day. NBIC leverages a variety of data feeds, including third party aggregators
like Google and subscription-based feeds such as HealthMap, as well as Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) feeds and web-scraping of highly relevant sources.
The NBIC biosurveillance taxonomy embedded in the tool consists of more than 600
metadata targets that cover key information for understanding the significance of
an
active biological event, including etiologic agents, impact to humans and animals
(e.g., infection severity, healthcare workers involved, type of host), social
disruption, infrastructure strain, countermeasures engaged, and ‘red
flag’ characteristics (e.g., pathogen appearance in a new geographic area,
unusual clinical signs). This taxonomy serves as a foundation for data curation and
can be tailored by NBIC partners to more directly meet their own mission
objectives.
At this time, metadata is predominately captured by NBIC analysts, who manually tag
information, which triggers the population of three automatically-disseminated
products from the tool: 1) the NBIC Daily Biosurveillance Review, 2) immediate and
daily summary email notifications, and 3) custom-designed RSS feeds. These products
are meant for individual recipients in the federal interagency and for consumption
by other biosurveillance information technology systems, such as the Department of
Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE).
NBIC is working in partnership with DTRA to integrate NBIC Biofeeds as an
application directly into the BSVE and further develop the BSVE as an all-in-one
platform for biosurveillance data analytics. To improve the efficiency and
effectiveness of gaining insights using NBIC Biofeeds, developers of the tool at the
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are researching and testing a variety
of advanced analytics techniques focused on: 1) article relevancy ratings to improve
the review of queried data, 2) significance ratings to elucidate the perceived
severity of an event based on reported characteristics, 3) full-text article
retrieval and storage for improved machine-tagging, and 4) anomaly detection for
emerging threats. Testing and implementation of new analytic capabilities in NBIC
Biofeeds is planned for this fiscal year.
Results
NBIC Biofeeds was developed to serve as a sophisticated and powerful open source
biosurveillance technology of value to the federal government by providing
information to stakeholders conducting open source biosurveillance as well as those
consuming biosurveillance information. In FY 2018, NBIC Biofeeds will begin
operational use by NBIC and an initial set of users in various federal agencies.
User accounts for testing purposes will be available to other federal partners, and
a broad scope of federal stakeholders can receive products directly from NBIC
Biofeeds based on their interests.
Conclusions
NBIC Biofeeds is expected to enable more rapid recognition and enhanced analysis of
emerging biological events by NBIC analysts. NBIC anticipates other federal agencies
with biosurveillance missions will find this technology of value and intends to
offer use of the platform to those federal partners that can benefit from access to
the tool and information generated from NBIC Biofeeds.