Abstract
AbstractWe present an application, and its development process, for interactive visual analysis of brain imaging data and clinical measurements. The application targets neuroscientists interested in understanding the correlations between active brain regions and physiological or psychological factors. The application has been developed in a participatory design process and has subsequently been released as the free software ‘VisualNeuro’. From initial observations of the neuroscientists' workflow, we concluded that while existing tools provide powerful analysis options, they lack effective interactive exploration requiring the use of many tools side by side. Consequently, our application has been designed to simplify the workflow combining statistical analysis with interactive visual exploration. The resulting environment comprises parallel coordinates for effective overview and selection, Welch's t‐test to filter out brain regions with statistically significant differences and multiple visualizations for comparison between brain regions and clinical parameters. These exploration concepts enable neuroscientists to interactively explore the complex bidirectional interplay between clinical and brain measurements and easily compare different patient groups. A qualitative user study has been performed with three neuroscientists from different domains. The study shows that the developed environment supports simultaneous analysis of more parameters, provides rapid pathways to insights and is an effective tool for hypothesis formation.
Highlights
The process of understanding complex brain-related diseases is to an increasing degree requiring a diverse set of study data to be collected and analysed
The study showed that the flexibility in selecting subject groups made it possible for the participants to form and reason about hypotheses in studies including brain imaging and clinical data
A practical example provided by one of the neuroscientists revolved around the two clinical parameters ‘anxiety’ and ‘history of abuse’
Summary
The process of understanding complex brain-related diseases is to an increasing degree requiring a diverse set of study data to be collected and analysed. The last decades have seen several efforts in collecting data from a large number of subjects, including the Human Connectome Project [VEUA*12], OpenNeuro [GES*17] and the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) [ZAB*14], to name a few. These efforts are paving the way for exploratory research in which data-driven hypotheses are formed. The mix of spatial neurometric data and heterogeneous clinical measurements, and the highly iterative nature of the exploratory process makes it challenging for neuroscientists to analyse and discover correlations and causal connections residing in the data. The process continues and is refined, spawning further questions, such as
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