Cancer Hotspot Identification and Analysis: A Scan Statistics Approach

Abstract

Nearly 10 million deaths from cancer are expected worldwide by 2020, making it the most common cause of death. India is anticipated to have 2.7 million cases. The count of 13.9 lakh new cases and 8.5 lakh deaths each year is highly disappointing. We proposed the application of scan statistics aiming at the identification of the hotspots of cancer incidence and mortality. The concept of hotspots allows us to develop an effective plan at the local and regional levels to combat the problems that are resulting from the concerning rise in cancer incidence and mortality. It is important to utilize spatio-temporal and longitudinal data to characterize the problem and evolve the strategy. The treatment of cancer is costly, and the consequential mental agony of the patient and their family is a great challenge to our society. The lack of health infrastructure for cancer treatment and non-optimal utilization of inadequate resources pose a great challenge and need to be resolved urgently. To address this issue, we found the hotspots of cancer incidence and mortality. We used SaTScan, MS Solver, R, SPSS, SAS, Tableau, and MS Excel to achieve computational efficacy. It is interesting to highlight that Kerala is the incidence hotspot, but Bihar is the mortality hotspot in India. The most frequently occurring cancer in males and females are the esophagus and larynx, respectively. The current work is relevant to individual patients as well as the concerned governments, policymakers, medical professionals, and all other stakeholders.