MMWR Surveill Summ
April 2019
Problem/condition: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is estimated to affect up to 3% of children in the United States. Public health surveillance for ASD among children aged 4 years provides information about trends in prevalence, characteristics of children with ASD, and progress made toward decreasing the age of identification of ASD so that evidence-based interventions can begin as early as possible.
Period Covered: 2010, 2012, and 2014.
Automating the extraction of behavioral criteria indicative of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in electronic health records (EHRs) can contribute significantly to the effort to monitor the condition. Word embedding algorithms such as Word2Vec can encode semantic meanings of words in vectors and assist in automated vocabulary discovery from EHRs. However, text available for training word embeddings for ASD is miniscule compared to the billions of tokens typically used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMMWR Surveill Summ
November 2018
Problem/condition: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Period Covered: 2012.
Description Of System: The Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network is an active surveillance system that provides estimates of the prevalence and characteristics of ASD among children aged 8 years whose parents or guardians reside in 11 ADDM Network sites in the United States (Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin).
Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) bring many opportunities for information utilization. One such use is the surveillance conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This process currently comprises manual collection and review of EHRs of 4- and 8-year old children in 11 US states for the presence of ASD criteria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe diet is emerging as the dominant source of arsenic exposure for most of the U.S. population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF