Information visualisation in clinical Odontology: multidimensional analysis and interactive data exploration

In 1995, the MedView project, based on a co-operation between computing science and clinical medicine was initiated. The overall goal of the project was to develop models, methods and tools to support clinicians in their daily diagnostic work. As part of MedView, two information visualisation tools were developed and tested as solutions to the problem of visualising clinical experience derived from large amounts of clinical data. The first tool (The Cube) was based on the idea of dynamic three-dimensional (3D) parallel diagrams, an idea similar to the notion of 3D parallel co-ordinates. The Cube was developed to enhance the clinician's ability to intelligibly analyse existing patient material and to allow for pattern recognition and statistical analysis. The second tool (SimVis) was based on a similarity assessment-based interaction model for exploring data, and was designed to help clinicians to classify and cluster clinical examination data. User interaction was supported by 3D visualisation of clusters and similarity measures. Both tools were tested on a knowledge base containing about 1500 examinations obtained from different clinics. Clinical practice indicated that the basic ideas are conceptually appealing to the involved clinicians as the tools can be used for generating and testing of hypotheses.