DEVELOPMENT OF A PRECISION EPIDEMIOLOGY WEB-BASED TOOL FOR LIVESTOCK DISEASE MANAGEMENT

The innovative solution proposed here aims to demonstrate the value and provide a customizedanalytical tool to predict, detect early and strategically control and eliminate livestock healthproblems given the particular characteristics and vulnerabilities of each farm.The long-term goal of our research team is to improve livestock health and welfare byadvancing the understanding of infectious disease dynamics (i.e., evolution and transmission patterns) and in the early identification and management of disease-associated production andreproduction problems. The overall objective of this proposal is to develop an operational, userfriendly,decision support, pEPI tool using a multi-scale, spatio-temporal-genomic approach andBig Data analytics to facilitate informed and timely decisions on livestock health.We will test our central hypothesis and achieve the overall goals of our proposal by pursuingthe following three objectives:Objective 1: Develop and implement a web-service tool enabling the automated connection,integration, secure access, and multi-level visualization of key swine-health data.Objective 2: Develop and evaluate an innovative precision epidemiology (pEPI) approach basedon Big Data analytics to generate accurate risk estimates & early detect swine health problems.Objective 3: Integrate all pEPI algorithms in a user-friendly online platform for their use byveterinarians and stakeholders and evaluate it usefulness to support decision-making