Effective April 1, 2018 J Espino, Director of RODS Laboratory, assumed oversight of the NRDM as Fuchiang (Rich) Tsui accepts position at University of PA/Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Ma, L., Tsui, F. C., Hogan, W. R., Wagner, M. M. and Ma, H. (2003), "A framework for infection control surveillance using association rules", AMIA ... Annual Symposium Proceedings/AMIA Symposium: 410-4.
Abstract: Surveillance of antibiotic resistance and nosocomial infections is one of the most important functions of a hospital infection control program. We employed the association rule method for automatically identifying new, unexpected, and potentially interesting patterns in hospital infection control. We hypothesized that mining for low-support, low-confidence rules would detect unexpected outbreaks caused by a small number of cases. To build a framework, we preprocessed the data and added new templates to eliminate uninteresting patterns. We applied our method to the culture data collected over 3 months from 10 hospitals in the UPMC Health System. We found that the new process and system are efficient and effective in identifying new, unexpected, and potentially interesting patterns in surveillance data. The clinical relevance and utility of this process await the results of prospective studies.