dccps logo
Geographic Information System
for Breast Cancer Studies on Long Island (LI GIS)

Software Links

Below are links to some software that LI GIS researchers may find helpful:

  • BioMedware – BioMedware has various software packages for biostatistics and geographic analysis, emphasizing human health and environment.
  • CLUSTER – This software is designed to help the researcher determine if there is a statistically significant chance that a disease cluster occurred other than by random phenomenon. The software includes 12 statistical methods that analyze the significance of a cluster using techniques that evaluate, time, space, and both time and space clustering.
  • ClusterSeer – ClusterSeer provides state-of-the-art statistics for evaluating disease clusters in space and time.
  • CrimeStat – CrimeStat is a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations, developed under grants from the National Institute of Justice. The program is Windows-based and interfaces with most desktop GIS programs. The purpose is to provide supplemental statistical tools to aid law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts.
  • Distance Mapping and Analysis Program (DMAP) – DMAP is a Windows compatible program that produces disease rates using variable spatial filters and tests for their statistical significance using Monte Carlo simulations. The program computes values that are inputs to GIS software that will produce disease rate maps and maps of statistical significance.
  • EpiAnalyst for ArcView GIS – This extension is a bridge between epidemiology and GIS that provides a tool and resource kit for spatial-epidemiologic research. It contains SatScan, has a link to CrimeStat, and includes the Spatial Data Modeller extension. Also included is software from The University of Iowa that allows one to perform the computations required to make smoothed maps of disease rates and tests of statistical significance. The extension interfaces with the latest version of Epi Info 2002 from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other software.
  • Epi Info and Epi Map – Epi Info and its mapping component Epi Map are public domain software packages designed for the global community of public health practitioners and researchers. Both provide for easy form and database construction, data entry, and analysis with epidemiologic statistics, maps, and graphs.
  • ESRI GIS Products – ESRI has a suite of GIS products, ArcView, ArcInfo, and additional related software and extensions to geographically visualize, query, and analyze data.
  • Geographical Analysis Machine (GAM) – GAM is an attempt at automated exploratory spatial data analysis of point or small area data that is easy to understand. The purpose is to answer a simple practical question: Given some spatial data of something interesting, where might there be evidence of localized geographical clustering if one does not know in advance where to look because of lack of knowledge of a possible causal mechanism, or if prior knowledge of the data precludes testing more hypotheses on the same database?
  • S+SpatialStats – This software provides a set of analysis tools for the exploration and modeling of spatially correlated data.
  • SAS Statistics – This software provides a wide range of statistical software, ranging from traditional analysis of variance to exact methods and dynamic data visualization techniques.
  • SaTScan – The SaTScan software is for analyzing spatial, temporal, and space-time point data using the spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistic. It is designed for any of the following interrelated purposes: evaluate reported spatial or space-time disease clusters to see if they are statistically significant; test whether a disease is randomly distributed over space, over time, or over space and time; and perform geographical surveillance of disease in order to detect areas of significantly high or low rates.
  • SpaceStat – Software for the analysis of spatial data. SpaceStat is a collection of functions to carry out spatial statistical and econometric analyses for so-called lattice data, i.e., observations for a fixed and given set of locations in space.
  • WinBUGS – WinBUGS is a statistical software package offered jointly by the MRC Biostatistics Unit and the Imperial College School of Medicine at St. Mary's, London. This software allows researchers to work with complex statistical models using Bayesian techniques.