Assessing Spatial Patterns Using GIS

Assessing Spatial Patterns of Both Disease and Environmental Pollution Using Geographical Information System (GIS)
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Introduction
Spatial representations of cervical cancer help to visualize the effect of social, economic and environmental determinants of the disease disparity. In many cases, the socioeconomic status of a population in a geographical area is often associated with the extent to which there is accessibility of health services, and economic wealth. Since there is a need to take into account local spatial variation as this avoids bias, when establishing the link between a disease and the explanatory variables (Chang, Atkinson & Shahani, 2011). Disease analysis that relies on Geographical Information System (GIS) helps to identify the local spatial variations, which then makes it easier to identify risk factors. As such, GIS is beneficial in disease analysis since the spatially referenced data represented in mapping focuses on visualizing spatial patterns. This paper will summarize the method used to present data on cervical cancer and socioeconomic status in Lesvos it will also give a description of the interaction as well as provide relevant figure to establish whether there is a relation between socioeconomic indicators and cervical cancer (Cancer Research UK.org, 2015). Summary of methods
The incidences of cervical cancer were tracked down, with geocoding helping to provide a general overview of differences in cervical cancer for the various municipalities of Lesvos As such, the there were significant spatial clusters of different incident rates ascertained using the ArcMap (ArcGIS) . The incidence rates are then vital to understand how the population estimates were related to the demographic profile of women who were more at risk of cervical cancer. As such, the number of women with cervical cancer per 1000 people was represented on the map with different colours to facilitate mapping. ArcMap (ArcGIS) also helped to map spatial patterns on socioeconomic status for the divergent municipalities to help evaluate the link between cervical cancer incidences rates the economic status. Including the explanatory variables that represented the socioeconomic status is assumed to be normally distributed to allow analysis. At the same time, data was aggregating for the various regions because of the confidentiality restrictions.
Data synthesis, analysis, interpretation and discussion
The number of women with cervical cancer per 1,000 differed showed spatial representation of cancer incidences rates. It is noteworthy that municipalities in the east reported higher incidence rates compared to other regions in the island of Lesvos. At the same time, the most western municipality and one southwestern municipality had the third highest rates between 0.042855 - 0.089626. Most other regions areas in the central region, north and south reported the second least and least incidence rates. On the other hand, the highest rates on the socioeconomic status were in the east regions and the southern western municipalities. These areas also correlated with the higher rates of cervical rates in Lesvos.
In a study conducted by (Hernandez 2011, pp1022-1023), the rates of colorectal ...