Project Team and Funding

Luc Anselin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Serge Rey, San Diego State University
Mark Gahegan, Pennsylvania State University
Frank Hardisty, University of South Carolina

Sponsor: Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine/Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
Time Frame: October 2003 to 2005

Project Overview

This project is a three-year research project funded by the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine/the Centers for Disease Control Cooperative Agreement Subawards Program (TS-1125). The overall objective of the proposed research is to develop, evaluate and implement a collection of analytical tools that explicitly leverage geographic information to assist state Comprehensive Cancer Control (CCC) programs in the identification of interesting patterns in prostate cancer incidence and mortality, their visualization and their explanation in terms of public health, environmental and socio-economic indicators at different spatial scales. The development consists of identifying current gaps in the state of the art of techniques and methodology, specifically as they apply to the identification and modeling of space-time patterns.

The evaluation pertains to a comparison and assessment of different statistical paradigms that have been suggested for application to the study of cancer (e.g., cluster statistics, machine learning, local indicators of spatial association, Bayesian hierarchical models, multilevel regression models and spatial regression models). This assessment will be based on a careful study of results provided by these methods applied to a series of case studies containing both actual and simulated data. A second component of the assessment will translate our findings into appropriate guidelines for policy and tactical resource allocation decisions that are part of state CCC programs. The implementation will consist of an open source spatial data analysis software toolkit tailored to applications in state CCC programs and a series of stand-alone, web-based, applications derived from this toolkit.

The project will take full advantage of outreach efforts within the ACN and the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS), to disseminate software developed and to provide training in its use to the cancer research and policy communities within Appalachia and beyond.

For more detail, visit the two TS-1125 project websites:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Pennsylvania State University

 Last updated January 5, 2006