the Data Vision Lab

Scientific visualizations are not to be overlooked

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 02:45:46 -0700

Scientific communication is heavily focused on the use of text as opposed to visuals. Writing text is, of course, important: it has the power to structure thoughts, clarify complex topics, and transfer research findings to peers. Any scientist can relate to the hours (and hours, and hours….) of work spent on writing, re-writing, editing, revising manuscripts and grant proposals.

In contrast, visual communication is not getting the same amount of attention. And this is truly a missed opportunity, because visual communication is a rich and powerful toolbox, filled with many types of figures, images, graphs, charts, infographics and tables, all conveying information in their own way.

In my ideal world, visuals get the same respect as a means of communicating science as text currently does. Because: visual communication also has the power to structure thoughts, clarify complex topics, and transfer research findings to peers. Just as manuscripts are being text-edited in detail, going back-and-forth between researchers and their peers and supervisors, passing through many rounds of revisions: well, the same should be true for scientific visuals.

Overlooking the importance of visual communication is a problem that occurs on many levels in the academic-pipeline:

Education
- Rarely do young, newly starting scientists receive basic training or guidance on visual communication
Acceptance
- Visuals are not fully embraced for their exploratory nor explanatory power
Tools

- Visuals are often created using default settings of the software that is being used by the researcher, which are not always optimized for communicative...Read More

A rollercoaster decade

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 02:01:07 -0700

Charting a lifeline

For more than a decade, my father has diligently tracked his blood values during his fight with prostate cancer. The amount of prostate specific antigen (PSA) in his blood became a lifeline, something to hold onto, in times where everything else seemed uncertain. PSA values are an indication for tumor activity, and therefore: lower is better. After every new blood draw, the results were awaited with the stress that comes with hoping the PSA would be lower than the previous one.

He started noting down every single PSA measurement on a sheet of graph paper.

Next to the chart, top left, you can see written in blue ink: 'start hormonen', indicating the start of hormone therapy. This therapy proved effective for about a year, the PSA levels steadily decreasing. Early 2008 however, the PSA values started to rise. Hormone therapy was not going to be enough anymore.

And that's when the rollercoaster ride of many years of chemotherapy started.

Additional pages of graph paper were taped to the first one. Each page taped vertically, to the top, meant stressful times because of crazy high PSA levels. Each page taped horizontally, to the right, meant a lot of gratitude for having lived another year.

After ten years of living with the disease, the chart covered the whole table.

That's when I decided to digitize these manual notes, keeping it close to the original version: an annotated line graph. I wanted to do this in d3.js. The first step was to put the data into Excel.

In the final line chart, I wanted to automatically highlight line sections (using width and color) during periods where treatments took place. I also wanted to distinguish hormone therapy, chemotherapy and treatment trials. So I cleaned up the data set so that d3.js could detect these periods:

That seemed to work, specific line sections now automatically showed when certain treatments had taken place:

I then finalized...Read More

On measuring our health

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 01:15:05 -0700

The need to measure our health

It is a very current topic in health care: Value Based Health Care.

Value Based Health Care was introduced by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg in 2006 with their book Redefining Health Care [1]. In this book they lay out a framework for organizing health care around the one thing that matters most: the health outcomes delivered to patients.

One of the key issues that Porter and Teisberg address is the absence of insight into these outcomes of care. Knowing what health benefits a certain treatment has or hasn’t had for patients is an essential first step in delivering good quality care. That’s why one of the six core components of Value Based Health Care is the measurement of health outcomes, as shown in Figure 1 (adapted from [2]):

Figure 1 The measurement of health outcomes is one of six components of the Value Agenda. Source: The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care, Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee, MD, Harvard Business Review October 2013 [2].

And that's where PROMs, or Patient Reported Outcomes Measures, come in.

In a series of blog posts I will take you through the history, science, applications and future development of PROMs. This series aims to address the question: what is needed if you want to turn health outcomes into numbers?

This is the first part of this series. So let’s start with defining what we are talking about:

What are PROs and PROMs?

To define PROMs, we first need to define what is meant with a Patient Reported Outcome, or PRO? According to the FDA guidelines from 2009 [3], a PRO is the following:

PRO - Patient Reported...Read More