Interactive exploration of a global clinical network from a large breast cancer cohort

Abstract

Abstract Despite unprecedented amount of information now available in medical records, health data remain underexploited due to their heterogeneity and complexity. Simple charts and hypothesis-driven statistics can no longer apprehend the content of information-rich clinical data. There is, therefore, a clear need for powerful interactive visualization tools enabling medical practitioners to perceive the patterns and insights gained by state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Here, we report an interactive graphical interface for use as the front end of a machine learning causal inference server (MIIC), to facilitate the visualization and comprehension by clinicians of relationships between clinically relevant variables. The widespread use of such tools, facilitating the interactive exploration of datasets, is crucial both for data visualization and for the generation of research hypotheses. We demonstrate the utility of the MIIC interactive interface, by exploring the clinical network of a large cohort of breast cancer patients treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). This example highlights, in particular, the direct and indirect links between post-NAC clinical responses and patient survival. The MIIC interactive graphical interface has the potential to help clinicians identify actionable nodes and edges in clinical networks, thereby ultimately improving the patient care pathway.