South-East Asia Regional Conference on Epidemiology

<strong>South</strong>-<strong>East</strong> <strong>Asia</strong> <strong>Regional</strong> <strong>Conference</strong> on Epidemiology | 211
(iii) presence of infrastructures, including the complete regional road network and mass transit system
(metro/subway, train and bus); (iv) 120 000 public, private sector and institutional resources from a
validated businesses and services directory; (v) education locations with complementary information
on school SES-index; (vi) bimestrial crime data at the police district level; (vii) Origin-Destination
surveys with detailed information on trips and daily movement patterns for 160 000 individuals within
the Metropolitan region; (viii) complete municipal valuation role with data on property values and
building units; (ix) voting patterns for federal and provincial elections; (x) a municipal database on the
location of citizen complaints, and (xi) Census (1996, 2001, 2006) data for >800 census variables coded
at tract - and dissemination - area levels. Geocoded morbidity, mortality and birth outcomes data are
available in aggregated form, with individual-level data from collaborators and the MEGAPHONE
team integrated into the GIS.
MEGAPHONE complies with international geospatial regulations and relies on leading software and
technical advances in GIS and spatial analysis tools. It includes: a catalogue with relational indicator
classification typology, an executable application for navigating metadata and sorting of indicators;
tracking software for documenting research project data; and sophisticated tools such as geo-database
with administrative limit files for geo-coding, upscaling or downscaling of data, and address-locator
software for geo-coding address or postal code data files. Spatial analysis tools (buffers, convex hulls,
segregation measures, macro for recalculation of data for changed census boundaries) and spatial sensitive
statistical methods (spatial autocorrelation, geographically-weighted regression and centrographic
analysis) are integrated for the derivation of spatially-informed, value-added data to extend beyond the
raw data contained within the GIS. MEGAPHONE is currently being used by the Montréal Public
Health Department (Direction de la santé publique, Régie régionale de Montréal-Centre) for surveillance
of local social, built and physical environmental risk conditions, health risk factors and disease outcomes.
In research, MEGAPHONE has been utilized thus far in collaborations with 24 peer-reviewed projects
with grants funds totalling $14.2 million. With ongoing development and regular updating of data,
the MEGAPHONE® GIS will remain a powerful tool for environmental, population and public health
research. It has the potential to be used as a model for similar developments in other settings to support
and enable international comparative research, particularly that supported by its relational indicator
classification framework, to determine conceptual comparability of related measures.
Acknowledgements
The assistance of Yan Kestens, co-developer of MEGAPHONE, is acknowledged with thanks. Special
thanks are expressed to Karine Léger, Abdel Majid Mohamed, Benoit Thierry, Jean-Bernard Gariépy,
Pier-Olivier Tremblay, Jean-Gabriel Hasbani and Gabriel Ladouceur.
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