Optimizing A syndromic surveillance text classifier for influenza-like illness: Does document source matter?
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 28, 2026

High-throughput Detection Method for Influenza Virus
Published on: February 4, 2012
Brett R South1, Brett Ray South, Wendy W Chapman
1VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Utah School of Medicine, USA.
Abstract:
Syndromic surveillance systems that incorporate electronic free-text data have primarily focused on extracting concepts of interest from chief complaint text, emergency department visit notes, and nurse triage notes. Due to availability and access, there has been limited work in the area of surveilling the full text of all electronic note documents compared with more specific document sources. This study provides an evaluation of the performance of a text classifier for detection of influenza-like illness (ILI) by document sources that are commonly used for biosurveillance by comparing them to routine visit notes, and a full electronic note corpus approach. Evaluating the performance of an automated text classifier for syndromic surveillance by source document will inform decisions regarding electronic textual data sources for potential use by automated biosurveillance systems. Even when a full electronic medical record is available, commonly available surveillance source documents provide acceptable statistical performance for automated ILI surveillance.
Related Concept Videos
Classification of Illness
An illness is a response to a disease in which the person's level of functioning is changed compared with a previous level. The general classification of illness includes acute and chronic.
Acute illness is severe and...
Principles of Disease Surveillance
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms-SNPs
Classification of Leukocytes
Neutrophils are the most abundant type of granular leukocytes, comprising 50-70% of all leukocytes. They feature small, evenly distributed granules and a...
Factors Affecting Illness
For instance, risk factors are connected to illness, disability,...
Steps in Outbreak Investigation
