Disease universe: Visualisation of population-wide disease-wide associations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization method for population-wide disease associations using a force-directed graph layout on electronic health records, enabling validation of known links and discovery of new patterns.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization approach based on Google Maps for exploring disease associations in health records, facilitating pattern recognition and validation.

Findings

Validates known disease associations

Identifies novel disease association patterns

Provides an interactive visualization tool

Abstract

We apply a force-directed spring embedding graph layout approach to electronic health records in order to visualise population-wide associations between human disorders as presented in an individual biological organism. The introduced visualisation is implemented on the basis of the Google maps platform and can be found at http://disease-map.net . We argue that the suggested method of visualisation can both validate already known specifics of associations between disorders and identify novel never noticed association patterns.