Gaining New Medical Insights from Visual Exploration

The application of modern technology in clinical practice leads to a massive increase in quantity and complexity of electronically acquired medical data and information. Current commercial clinical information systems are faced with the explosion of available medical parameters and users of these systems ask for alternative, more intuitive solutions. Interactive visual representations are an instrument to avoid information overload and to make information from multiple heterogeneous data sources comprehensible. Especially in the medical domain time-oriented data plays a central role. These representations encompass changes of patients‘ condition, therapeutic actions, interventions, and measures, trends, patterns, and relationships between parameters over time. Central to the visualization of medical data is not the presentation or graphical rendering but to gain new insights and knowledge from intensive active examination of the collected data and information. Static visualizations do not support such an analytical process because they allow for passive viewing only. Visual exploration requires flexible methods for interaction and manipulation. Aim The project‘s objective is the development of a flexible, interactive visualization environment for time-oriented, medical data and information. These methods and tools will facilitate data analysis and interpretation tasks for physicians and clinical personnel in order to support medical treatment and enhance quality of care. The methods developed in this project will form the basis of a software package that can be integrated into diverse clinical information systems and also into consoles of medical equipment. This opens ample opportunities for the application of visual exploration in the medical domain.