RenalViz: Visual analysis of cohorts with chronic kidney disease

Abstract

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is a prominent health problem. Progressive CKD leads to impaired kidney function with decreased ability to filter the patients’ blood, concluding in multiple complications, like heart disease and ultimately death from the disease. In previous work, we developed a prototype to support nephrologists in gaining an overview of their CKD patients. The prototype visualizes the patients in cohorts according to their pairwise similarity. The user can interactively modify the similarity by changing the underlying weights of the included features. The work in this paper expands upon this previous work by the enlargement of the data set and the user interface of the application. With a focus on the distinction between individual CKD classes we introduce a color scheme used throughout all visualization. Furthermore, the visualizations were adopted to display the data of several patients at once. This also involved the option to align the visualizations to sentinel points, such as the onset of a particular CKD stage, in order to quantify the progression of all selected patients in relation to this event. The prototype was developed in response to the identified potential for improvement of the earlier application. An additional user study concerning the intuitiveness and usability confirms good results for the prototype and leads to the assessment of an easy-to-use approach.