Changhua and Yunlin are two major agricultural counties in Taiwan, where heavy environmental pollution occurred due to rapid industrialization in the 1970’s. As a result, health of residents in certain areas was severely affected. To facilitate health risk assessment in these areas, a tool was developed to identify pollution “hot-spot” areas using a spatial autocorrelation model and heat map with hierarchical clustering in mortality risk. We can then examine the important health risk factors these particular areas. The system was developed with a freeware of R script that displayed the results of a cluster analysis by permuting the rows and the columns of a matrix of place similar values near each other. This method was used to survey distribution of mortality by year and identify the possible trend of certain disease. The study used cluster heap map to display the relationship between spatial and temporal information of mortality data visually and rapidly. The disparity of health conditions can be greatly through the identification and mitigation of priority risk factors in environment.
Date:
2013-06
Relation:
Journal of Taiwan Association for Medical Informatics. 2013 Jun;22(2):1-14.
