While all the international infectious disease surveillance systems share similar objectives, each system site varies in its system architecture, its information processing management techniques, its algorithms for detection, and each focus on different diseases. INFECTIOUS DISEASE INFORMATICS: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense corrects these problems. The book will analyze and evaluate the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of the existing surveillance systems from a systematic framework. Specifically, the book will meet the following critical needs in detecting infectious diseases:

1. It will provide an integrated, synthesized, and interdisciplinary analysis of infectious surveillance techniques. It will include statistical modeling techniques, but go beyond statistical modeling to include information systems design, data standards, computational aspects of bio-surveillance, information visualization, and system evaluation.
2. It will emphasize the practical importance of the area and integrate the material from Public Health, Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Public Administration Policy, Geographical Information Systems, etc. into a unified state-of-the-art treatment of syndromic surveillance systems.

By its very nature, infectious disease surveillance is a dynamic, fast-moving field. Therefore the book will provide policy makers and public health practitioners with the most recent research findings, methodologies, and implementation issues from case studies of concrete application scenarios.