Data visualization in healthcare and medicine: a survey

Abstract

Visualization analysis is crucial in healthcare as it provides insights into complex data and aids healthcare professionals in efficiency. Information visualization leverages algorithms to reduce the complexity of high-dimensional heterogeneous data, thereby enhancing healthcare professionals’ understanding of the hidden associations among data structures. In the field of healthcare visualization, efforts have been made to refine and enhance the utility of data through diverse algorithms and visualization techniques. This review aims to summarize the existing research in this domain and identify future research directions. We searched Web of Science, Google Scholar and IEEE Xplore databases, and ultimately, 76 articles were included in our analysis. We collected and synthesized the research findings from these articles, with a focus on visualization, artificial intelligence and supporting tasks in healthcare. Our study revealed that researchers from diverse fields have employed a wide range of visualization techniques to visualize various types of data. We summarized these visualization methods and proposed recommendations for future research. We anticipate that our findings will promote further development and application of visualization techniques in healthcare.