Visual Analytics for the Representation, Exploration, and Analysis of High-Dimensional, Multi-faceted Medical Data.

Abstract

Medicine is among those research fields with a significant impact on humans and their health. Already for decades, medicine has established a tight coupling with the visualization domain, proving the importance of developing visualization techniques, designed exclusively for this research discipline. However, medical data is steadily increasing in complexity with the appearance of heterogeneous, multi-modal, multi-parametric, cohort or population, as well as uncertain data. To deal with this kind of complex data, the field of Visual Analytics has emerged. In this chapter, we discuss the many dimensions and facets of medical data. Based on this classification, we provide a general overview of state-of-the-art visualization systems and solutions dealing with high-dimensional, multi-faceted data. Our particular focus will be on multi-modal, multi-parametric data, on data from cohort or population studies and on uncertain data, especially with respect to Visual Analytics applications for the representation, exploration, and analysis of high-dimensional, multi-faceted medical data.