The goal of the Bio-Surveillance program is to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches. The key to mitigating a biological attack is early detection. Given the availability of appropriate medications, as many as half the expected casualties could be prevented if an attack is detected only a few days earlier than it would have otherwise been identified. For contagious biological agents, early detection is also clearly paramount. The Bio-Surveillance program will dramatically increase DoD's ability to detect a clandestine biological warfare attack in time to respond effectively and so avoid potentially thousands of casualties.
The Bio-Surveillance program is seeking to achieve its objective by monitoring non-traditional data sources such as animal sentinels, behavioral indicators, and pre-diagnostic medical data. Technical challenges include correlating/integrating information derived from heterogeneous data sources, development of autonomous signal detection algorithms, refinement of disease models for autonomous detection, and ensuring privacy protection while correlating widely differing data and sources.
