Medical Glyphs

An essential but to date unsolved problem in the emerging field of personalized medicine is the question of how to identify connections between genetic variants and their corresponding diseases or the response to certain drugs and treatments, respectively. To address this challenge connect molecular data (genetic polymorphisms, gene expression data, proteomics, pathways) and clinical data in order to categorize specific subgroups of patients with certain diseases.

For the visualization of medical data sets we developed two types of 3D gylphs: Object-glyphs representing a subset of different clinical parameters, e.g. age, staging, survival data etc. and Attribute-Glyphs for the visualization of value distributions. Both types of glyphs have symmetry axes (like a crystal) in order to provide an efficient way of spatial arrangement for the interactive definition of hierarchical structures and subgroups.


Object and Attribute Glyphs
Figure 1 depicts an outline of an object glyph summarizing up to 6 clinical parameters
and an attribute glyph for the distribution of a tri-state attribute.


Object Glyphs
Figure 2 shows attribute glyphs showing the distribution of gene expression values
for a big number of tissue samples. Each glyph represents a specific gene,
and the semi-transparent red boxes depict a cluster of genes.


Attribute Glyphs
Figure 3 shows the distribution of the staging of mamma carcinomas within the year 1985 to 1988.
The used object gylphs also visualize the disease free survival and grading of the tissue samples.


Staging of Mamma Carcinoma, 1985 - 2000
Figure 4 shows with the same visualization strategy an overview
of 8256 cases for the time period 1984 to 2004.


Object Glyph Design Studies
Figure 5: A first prototype of a set of object-glyphs for the Caleydo framework.

Publications

  • Heimo Mueller, Kurt Zatloukal, Marc Streit, Dieter Schmalstieg:
    Interactive Exploration of Medical Data Sets
    To appear in: Symposium on Information Visualization in Biomedical Informatics, 12th International Conference on Information Visualization, London, UK, July 2008.

  • Heimo Mueller, Doris Ulrich, Michael Kalkusch, Fritz Wiesinger:
    Medical Glyphs in Personalized Medicine
    Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Design, Curitiba, Brazil, 2007.


website maintained by Marc Streit and Alexander Lex
last updated on 2010-07-29