Course Advanced GIS in Health Sciences

The course P324/02 Advanced GIS in Health Sciences is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2025.

Criteria for participation:
University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Requirements for participation:
This advanced GIS course is for those who have already taken, AU Health’s Basic GIS course, P272/04 GIS in Health Sciences, OR a relevant course, and wish to gain deeper knowledge and understanding.

Aim:
The course aims to

• Provide theoretical background of advanced spatial modelling, analyses and visualization
• Introduce participants to spatial programming
• Give participants hands-on experience in advanced spatial analyses and programming with focus on health-related exercises

Learning outcomes:

Knowledge and understanding

 On completion of the course, the student should be able to:

• Understand and explain the basic methodologies and conceptual models of the contents of a geographic database
• Explain the different geographical data formats
• Explain the principles of transformation between different geodesic reference system
• Explain concepts and estimation methods within advanced spatial analysis and modelling
• Account for auto-correlation in geographic data

Ability and skills

• Visualize the geographic data using advanced 2D and 3D mapping tools
• Carry out advanced interpolation with geographic data
• Carry out and present advanced statistical analysis of interpolated spatial data
• Perform spatial auto-correlation analysis with geographic data
• Create a spatial database, import, export data and query data from it
• Create programming scripts spatial GIS analysis

Workload:
The full workload of the course is expected to be 50 hours.

Content: 
The course consists of a number of modules with advanced concepts in methods of analysis and presentation of geographical information and constructing databases.

The course includes the following topics:

• A recap of basic GIS analysis
• Data collection and format
• Advanced visualization (QGIS, ArcGIS and R/Python)
• Advanced spatial interpolation and spatial modelling
• Spatial autocorrelation
• Database development (spatial SQL)
• Spatial programming (R/Python and spatial SQL)

Hands-on exercises (computer labs) on spatial interpolation, modelling, database development and spatial programming

Instructors:

Course Lead and Responsible: Assistant Professor Jibran Khan, Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Roskilde

Co-lecturer: Assistant Professor Jörg Schullehner, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 20 October 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 21 October 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 22 October 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 23 October 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 24 October 2025 09:00 - 16:00