Title
Uncovering chains of infections through spatio-temporal and visual analysis of COVID-19 contact traces
Abstract
A major challenge for departments of public health (DPHs) in dealing with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is tracing contacts in exponentially growing SARS-CoV-2 infection clusters. Prevention of further disease spread requires a comprehensive registration of the connections between individuals and clusters. Due to the high number of infections with unknown origin, the healthcare analysts need to identify connected cases and clusters through accumulated epidemiological knowledge and the metadata of the infections in their database. Here we contribute a visual analytics dashboard to identify, assess and visualize clusters in COVID-19 contact tracing networks. Additionally, we demonstrate how graph-based machine learning methods can be used to find missing links between infection clusters and thus support the mission to get a comprehensive view on infection events. This work was developed through close collaboration with DPHs in Germany. We argue how our dashboard supports the identification of clusters by public health experts, discuss ongoing developments and possible extensions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.cag.2022.05.013
Computers & Graphics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Visual analytics,Health care information systems,Public health,SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,Corona virus
Journal
106
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0097-8493
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dario Antweiler100.34
David Sessler200.34
Maxim Rossknecht300.34
Benjamin Abb400.34
Sebastian Ginzel500.34
Jörn Kohlhammer600.34