[...]... employable in human decision making; for example, finding petrol deposits and searching for pathogenic genes, producing GIS products and inventing genetic pharmacy, and building government decision support systems and carrying out genetic therapies Besides sharing a common methodology and philosophy, bioinformatics and geoinformatics are influencing one another For example, GIS is used in displaying and undertaking... Cancer Incidence in Finland 1953-1982 Vol 37 Helsinki: Cancer Society of Finland [21]Rushton G and Lolonis P (1996) Exploratory spatial analysis of birth defect rates in an urban population Statistics in Medicine 15:717-726 [22]Rushton G, Krishnamurthy R, Krishnamurti D, Lolonis P, Song H (1996) The spatial relationship between infant mortality and birth defect rates in a U.S City Statistics in Medicine... where Y denotes cases of an infection and X the factors Birth defects, defined as "any anomaly, functional or structural, that is present in infancy or later in life (ICBDMS)", are a major cause of infant mortality and a leading cause of disability in China The left side of Figure 2 illustrates the neural tube birth defect (NTD) prevalence in China; the right side of Figure 2 shows the NTD in Heshun... distinct disciplines have at least a 70% overlap in the mathematics employed, including the Bayesian inference, dynamic program, Markov chain, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, probability likelihood, cluster, HMM (hind markov model), SVM (support vector machine), CA (Cella Automa), etc (Baldi and Brunak 1998; Haining 2003) With findings accumulated from fundamental research and improvements... Statistics in Medicine 19:23992408 [26]Tiwari C and Rushton G (2004) Using spatially adaptive filters to map late stage colorectal cancer incidence in Iowa In: Fisher P (ed) Developments in spatial data handling Springer-Verlag, pp 665-676 [27]Tyczynski JE, Pasanen K, Berkel HJ, Pukkala E (2006) Atlas of Cancer in Ohio: Incidence & Mortality The Cancer Prevention Institute, Columbus, Ohio [28]Weinstock... persistent in poor areas and occurs in rapidly developing regions The causal factors and determinants of a disease are critical in its control and intervention These factors could be in different levels, from micro gene, physiological, chemical or biological abnormality, to the macro media or geographical environment Such factors at different levels could exist in a cause-effect chain or separately and independently... indicate evidence of a clustering of cases in the network and a high positive value evidence of scattering We investigated associations between environmental factors and SARS by considering seven possible networks for the spread of infection among the districts in Beijing in spring of 2003 (Meng et al 2005) The networks were assessed against the data using the BW join-count test The seven networks are listed... to integrate many kinds of spatially related information The huge amounts of data from the micro genome to the macro digital earth have promoted the developments of bioinformatics and geoinformatics respectively Pattern alignment and correlation, spatial prediction, hotspot detection are current topics of research interests in both bioinformatics and geoinformatics It has been said that the two distinct... produced by a floating spatial filter producing a weighted average of the rates in surrounding counties—second-level data smoothing This double smoothing of data and then rates, we believe, should be avoided In kernel density estimation the data for numerator and denominator are collected for the spatially adaptive area and then the rate is computed and attributed to the grid point from which the kernel... authors have in mind involve local communities setting objectives, planning strategies, implementing them, and finally, determining improvements in health achieved by their activities Each of these steps is explicitly spatial: where activities are directed, who is affected, and whose health is improved? Location is a critical part of this framework As with all chronic diseases, factors that influence . approach in bring- ing together and reconciling market and public interests. Talking to each other and sharing critical information are getting increasingly. authors have in mind involve local communities setting objectives, planning strategies, implementing them, and finally, determining improvements in health