Application of Interactive Motion Charts for Displaying Liver Transplantation Data in Public Websites

Abstract

In the past several years a vast amount of digital information has become available in every field of science, and ideas to apply improved strategies for obtaining a more in-depth knowledge of the data are considered in many areas. Although several American and European organizations show regularly in their public websites the aggregated results of organ donation and transplantation, no tools are provided to engage with the final users and to enable them to handle these data. In this study, a new model of Web-based interactive motion charts was applied to aggregated liver transplantation data obtained from a consecutive 28-year series of liver transplantation performed in a single Italian center. The interactive charts were obtained by combining the Google visualization application programming interface and the googleVis package within the open source statistical environment R. The interactive charts may be embedded into online/offline Web pages and rendered in each common browser. The users may interact with the charts by selecting chart type (bubble, bar, or line chart), x- and y-axis scales (linear or logarithmic), variables, bubble size, color, and even changing opacity of unselected items. Moreover, the charts may dynamically display the trend over time of each continuous/categoric variable, allowing users both to trace how the lines changes over time and to control the animation speed. The interactive motion charts should be used in the public websites that manage aggregated data concerning organ donation and transplantation.