No abstract

Healthcare systems are under pressure from an aging population, rising costs, and increasingly complex conditions and treatments. Although data are determined to play a bigger role in how doctors diagnose and prescribe treatments, they struggle due to a lack of time and an abundance of structured and unstructured information. To address this challenge, we introduce MediCoSpace , a visual decision-support tool for more efficient doctor-patient consultations. The tool links patient reports to past and present diagnoses, diseases, drugs, and treatments, both for the current patient and other patients in comparable situations. MediCoSpace uses textual medical data, deep-learning supported text analysis and concept spaces to facilitate a visual discovery process. The tool is evaluated with five medical doctors. The results show that MediCoSpace facilitates a promising, yet complex way to discover unlikely relations and thus suggests a path toward the development of interactive visual tools to provide physicians with more holistic diagnoses and personalized, dynamic treatments for patients.

No abstract

In many domains, multivariate event sequence data is collected focused around an entity (the case). Typically, each event has multiple attributes, for example, in healthcare a patient has events such as hospitalization, medication, and surgery. In addition to the multivariate events, also the case (a specific attribute, e.g., patient) has associated multivariate data (e.g., age, gender, weight). Current work typically only visualizes one attribute per event (label) in the event sequences. As a consequence, events can only be explored from a predefined case‐centric perspective. However, to find complex relations from multiple perspectives (e.g., from different case definitions, such as doctor), users also need an event‐ and attribute‐centric perspective. In addition, support is needed to effortlessly switch between and within perspectives. To support such a rich exploration, we present FlexEvent: an exploration and analysis method that enables investigation beyond a fixed case‐centric perspective. Based on an adaptation of existing visualization techniques, such as scatterplots and juxtaposed small multiples, we enable flexible switching between different perspectives to explore the multivariate event sequence data needed to answer multi‐perspective hypotheses. We evaluated FlexEvent with three domain experts in two use cases with sleep disorder and neonatal ICU data that show our method facilitates experts in exploring and analyzing real‐world multivariate sequence data from different perspectives.