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A Visual Explorer for Retrospective Trajectories in Children Following Heart Surgery
Laila Neu1, Louisa Bode1,2, Marcel Schack1,2
1Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics of TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany.
Insights
We developed TRACE, an interactive visualization tool, to help understand patient recovery after pediatric heart surgery. This tool aids clinicians in exploring complex postoperative data to identify potential complications and improve patient outcomes.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric critical care medicine
- Clinical informatics
- Data visualization
Background:
- Children undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass face risks of complications like acute kidney injury and infection.
- Postoperative monitoring in pediatric patients is complex due to frequent interventions, age-specific data, and diverse data sources.
Purpose of the Study:
- To create an interactive visualization tool for exploring retrospective postoperative trajectories in children after heart surgery.
- To assist clinicians in understanding patient recovery pathways and identifying factors associated with complications.
Main Methods:
- Development of the TRACE (Trajectory(-based) Retrospective Analysis for Clinical Exploration) prototype in collaboration with clinicians.
- Collection of user feedback via a questionnaire assessing usability, clinical utility, and visualization effectiveness.
- Evaluation of the tool's usability using the System Usability Scale.
Main Results:
- The TRACE tool achieved a high mean System Usability Scale score of 82.5.
- Clinician feedback indicated the tool's potential utility in clinical, research, and teaching environments.
- The visualizations were found effective for exploring patient data trajectories.
Conclusions:
- TRACE is a promising interactive tool for analyzing complex pediatric postoperative data after cardiac surgery.
- The tool facilitates a better understanding of patient trajectories and potential complication factors.
- Future work includes integrating TRACE with the ELISE dataset for broader research access and analysis.
Abstract:
Children after cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass are susceptible to a variety of complications and poor outcomes, e.g., acute kidney injury or infection. Postoperative monitoring in children is a complex process, characterized by frequent interventions, age-varying reference ranges, different data sources, among other factors. Visual analysis of retrospective data could offer significant clinical value by improving understanding of trajectories and potential factors for complications. Therefore, we aim to create an interactive visualization tool to assist in exploration of retrospective postoperative trajectories of children following heart surgery. We present the prototype TRACE (Trajectory(-based) Retrospective Analysis for Clinical Exploration) that was developed in close collaboration with clinicians. Feedback was collected using a questionnaire with qualitative and quantitative items, designed to assess usability, utility in clinical, research and teaching settings, and effectiveness of the proposed visualizations. The tool achieved a mean system usability scale score of 82.5. Future work will focus on releasing TRACE to researchers with access to the ELISE dataset, a comprehensive, open pediatric ICU dataset, facilitating data understanding and analysis of trajectories in critically ill children following cardiopulmonary bypass.
