GISTelemed is an information and data visualization and recovery mechanism, integrated into a telemedicine system, interactively indexing, retrieving and displaying georeferenced information on a map or aerial images. The retrieval mechanism indexes structured data, semi-structured and DICOM SR objects, allowing to perform several epidemiological analyses and plot them on a map or aerial image.

As an example, the image below shows the distribution of skin cancer patients that were referred directly from primary healthcare to an oncological clinic (Code Yellow) in the Itajaí River Valley in 2017. Municipalities that have more than 1 primary healthcare facility are plotted as Voronoi diagrams, showing different incidences per area. In order to generate this image we took a large timespan, but we could have chosen daily data and have plotted it on dynamic timeline-based map.

The next image shows the same data, plotted as a heat map:

The figure below presents another example of the prototype, showing occurrences for the year of 2015 of Second Opinion Requests by Family Doctors as a heta map and as ocurrence bubbles (a and b) and Dermatology Triages that resulted in codes Yellow (direct referral to specialized care) and Red (immediate hospitalization). (c) shows an overview of the Municipalities of the the Eastern Area of Santa Catarina and (d) depicts a detailed view of Santa Catarina Island and the Greater Florianópolis Region.

Results are also shown as graphics and tables. The figure below shows an example where the search results for the association between four different variables and skin cancer are shown: sex and comorbidities (as pie charts) and color and morphology (as tables):

All results can be exported as spreadsheet files in the .xls format.

Real-Time Monitoring of Events

The GISTelemed tool also allows the real-time monitoring of events ocurring on the Telemedicine and the Telehealth networks and, more recently, all pacient referral requests (TFD), as shown in the figure below. We call this operation mode “Situation Room”. In its present version, the system offers a fixed pallete of events to be monitored. Events are organized per originating Primary Healthcare Facility. Last event is shown in a pop-up window.

References

1. INÁCIO, A.S. , MACEDO, D. D. J., ANDRADE, R., VON WANGENHEIM, A. An Architecture for Information Retrieval in a Telemedicine System In: CBMS 2014 – XXVII International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2014, Nova Iorque, EUA.   Proceedings of the CBMS 2014 – XXVII International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2014. v.1. p.1 – [ResearchGate]
2.  INÁCIO, A.S. ; SAVARIS, A. ; ALVES, J.M. ; VON WANGENHEIM, A. . GISTelemed: an Online-based GIS Approach to Epidemiological Analysis in Telemedicine Systems. In: EMBC’16 – 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2016, Orlando, FL, EUA. Proceedings of the 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2016. v. 1. p. 1-4. DOI10.1109/EMBC.2016.7591942 [ResearchGate]
3. INÁCIO, A.S. , MACEDO, D. D. J., ANDRADE, R., VON WANGENHEIM, A. Designing an information retrieval system for the STT/SC. IEEE HealthCom – 16th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services. 2014;500–5. [ResearchGate]