https://www.selleckchem.com/products/Verteporfin(Visudyne).html Many statistical models have been developed during the last years to smooth risks in disease mapping. However, most of these modeling approaches do not take possible local discontinuities into consideration or if they do, they are computationally prohibitive or simply do not work when the number of small areas is large. In this paper, we propose a two-step method to deal with discontinuities and to smooth noisy risks in small areas. In a first stage, a novel density-based clustering algorithm is used. In contrast to previous proposals, this algorithm is able to automatically detect the number of spatial clusters, thus providing a single cluster structure. In the second stage, a Bayesian hierarchical spatial model that takes the cluster configuration into account is fitted, which accounts for the discontinuities in disease risk. To evaluate the performance of this new procedure in comparison to previous proposals, a simulation study has been conducted. Results show competitive risk estimates at a much better computational cost. The new methodology is used to analyze stomach cancer mortality data in Spanish municipalities.The estimation of hidden sub-populations is a hard task that appears in many fields. For example, public health planning in Brazil depends crucially of the number of people who holds a private health insurance plan and hence rarely uses the public services. Different sources of information about these sub-populations may be available at different geographical levels. The available information can be transferred between these different geographic levels to improve the estimation of the hidden population size. In this study, we propose a model that use individual level information to learn about the dependence between the response variable and explanatory variables by proposing a family of link functions with asymptotes that are flexible enough to represent the real aspects of the data and