Weiser Armin A, Thöns Christian, Filter Matthias, Falenski Alexander, Appel Bernd, Käsbohrer Annemarie
Department Biological Safety, Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 17;11(3):e0151977. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151977. eCollection 2016.
FoodChain-Lab is modular open-source software for trace-back and trace-forward analysis in food-borne disease outbreak investigations. Development of FoodChain-Lab has been driven by a need for appropriate software in several food-related outbreaks in Germany since 2011. The software allows integrated data management, data linkage, enrichment and visualization as well as interactive supply chain analyses. Identification of possible outbreak sources or vehicles is facilitated by calculation of tracing scores for food-handling stations (companies or persons) and food products under investigation. The software also supports consideration of station-specific cross-contamination, analysis of geographical relationships, and topological clustering of the tracing network structure. FoodChain-Lab has been applied successfully in previous outbreak investigations, for example during the 2011 EHEC outbreak and the 2013/14 European hepatitis A outbreak. The software is most useful in complex, multi-area outbreak investigations where epidemiological evidence may be insufficient to discriminate between multiple implicated food products. The automated analysis and visualization components would be of greater value if trading information on food ingredients and compound products was more easily available.
FoodChain-Lab是一款模块化开源软件，用于食源性疾病暴发调查中的溯源和追踪分析。自2011年以来，德国多起与食品相关的疫情中对适用软件的需求推动了FoodChain-Lab的开发。该软件允许进行集成数据管理、数据链接、数据充实和可视化，以及交互式供应链分析。通过计算受调查食品处理站（公司或个人）和食品的追踪分数，有助于识别可能的疫情源头或传播媒介。该软件还支持考虑特定站点的交叉污染、地理关系分析以及追踪网络结构的拓扑聚类。FoodChain-Lab已成功应用于先前的疫情调查，例如在2011年肠出血性大肠杆菌疫情和2013/14年欧洲甲型肝炎疫情期间。该软件在复杂的多区域疫情调查中最为有用，在这类调查中，流行病学证据可能不足以区分多种受牵连的食品。如果食品成分和复合产品的交易信息更容易获取，自动化分析和可视化组件将更有价值。
