TrajectoryViz: Interactive visualization of treatment trajectories

Abstract

Background and objectives

With the proliferation of real-world or observational health data, there is increasing interest in studying treatment trajectories. The real-life treatment trajectories can be complex, and one has to simplify the patterns to draw any conclusions; however, oversimplification will cause the loss of essential details. Thus, the visualization challenge is to strike a balance between the two extremes.

Methods

We have implemented the observation of treatment trajectories starting from cohort definitions in cooperation with medical specialists, data processing, and then generating the interactive visualizations and detailed data tables derived from input data within an open-source R package as a Shiny dashboard. The created R package called TrajectoryViz (https://github.com/HealthInformaticsUT/TrajectoryViz) enables reproducible visual analysis and visual content generation for various data investigations and explanations.

Results

We illustrate the use of the tool by assessing the sequence of events present within the data of cervical cancer prevention pathways, as well as the proportions of timely follow-up procedure events.

Conclusion

Building a toolset to access, manage, and analyze observational health data enables more accessible visual analysis of complicated data, adding time dimension to otherwise simplified event sequences that make up trajectories.