Data mining on temporal data: a visual approach and its clinical application to hemodialysis

Abstract The quantity and complexity of data acquired, time-stamped and stored in clinical databases by automated medical devices is rapidly and continuously increasing. As a result, it becomes more and more important to provide clinicians with easy-to-use interactive tools to analyze huge amounts of this data. This paper proposes an approach for visual data mining on temporal data and applies it to a real medical problem, i.e. the management of hemodialysis. The approach is based on the integration of 3D and 2D information visualization techniques and offers a set of interactive functionalities that will be described in detail in the paper. We will also discuss how the system has been evaluated with end users and how the evaluation led to changes in system design.