AnamneVis: A Framework for the Visualization of Patient History and Medical Diagnostics Chains
Zhiyuan Zhang, Faisal Ahmed, Arunesh Mittal, Rong Zhao, Asa W. Viccellio, Klaus D. Mueller · 2011
The medical history or anamnesis of a patient is the factual information obtained by a physician for the medical diagnostics of a patient. This information includes current symptoms, history of present illness, previous treatments, available data, current medications, past history, family history, and others. Based on this information the physician follows through a medical diagnostics chain that includes requests for further data, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, and eventually a report of treatment outcome. Patients often have rather complex medical histories, and visualization and visual analytics can offer large benefits for the navigation and reasoning with this information. Here we present AnamneVis, a system where the patient is represented as a radial sunburst visualization that captures all health conditions of the past and present to serve as a quick overview to the interrogating physician. The patient’s body is represented as a stylized body map that can be zoomed into for further anatomical detail. On the other hand, the reasoning chain is represented as a multi-stage flow chart, composed of date, symptom, data, diagnosis, treatment, and outcome.