Current guidelines suggest that areas associated with the highest risk of cardiac arrest should be targeted for AED deployment. 8 However, the method of identifying these cardiac arrest "hot spots" to optimize AED deployment in any given community is not clear. Throughout this article, we will refer to a cardiac arrest hot spot as a location with the occurrence of ≥1 historical cardiac arrests (over the 4.5-year time interval of the project) with no registered AED within a 100-m radius.Background-Geospatial methods using mathematical optimization to identify clusters of cardiac arrests and prioritize public locations for defibrillator deployment have not been studied. Our objective was to develop such a method and test its performance against a population-guided approach.

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