Visualization of unstructured text sequences of nursing narratives

Abstract

This paper presents a keyword-based information visualization technique for nursing record sequences. Visualizing the trend information rooted in unstructured and fragmented abstract text data is a largely unaddressed problem. In our technique, multiple hierarchical keyword based visualizations are used to explore unstructured text data from nursing records. First, each text data set is broken up into a list of keywords to enable the visualization of keyword occurrences over time and the relative distribution of keywords. A graphical user interface is provided to enable selection and classification of keywords. Users may select one or more data sets to compare, in addition to one or more groups of keywords to add to the visualization. Colors are used to distinguish quickly and easily between groups of keywords present in the visualization. At the second level of hierarchy, keywords for visualization are discovered through a predetermined automatic detection and scoring based mechanism. The aggregate frequency trend of keywords from all data sets is also provided in both hierarchies as a way to visualize overall trends and analyze various events in time.