Media Monitoring of Public Health Threats with MedISys

Abstract

The Medical Information System (MedISys) is a fully automatic event-based surveillance system that monitors reporting on infectious diseases in man and animals, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats, plant health and food & feed contaminations on the internet. The system retrieves news articles from specialised official and unofficial medical sites, general news media and selected blogs, categorizes all incoming articles according to pre-defined multilingual categories, identifies known names such as organizations, persons and locations, extracts events, clusters news articles and calculates statistics to detect emerging threats. Users can screen the categorized articles and display world maps highlighting event locations together with statistics on the reporting of health threats, countries and combinations thereof. Articles can be further filtered by language, news source, and country. Analysts can use a collaborative tool called NewsDesk to further refine the selection of automatically retrieved articles and create reports or deliver notifications via e-mail or SMS.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen