CTeXplorer

This project has been retired and is no longer supported

Researchers

  • Maria-Elena Hernandez
  • Margaret-Anne Storey

Publications

Hernandez, M.-E., Carini, S., Storey, M.-A., & Sim, I. (2008). "An Interactive Tool for Visualizing Design Heterogeneity in Clinical Trials." AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2008, 298–302.

CTeXplorer is a prototype for adaptive visualizations to gain insight from a collection of clinical trials for the prevention of Mother to Child transmission (MTCT) of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The aim is to reduce the time medical researchers spend conducting literature reviews of related clinical trials and to ease the process of understanding data within clinical trials.

Comparing clinical trials is an important task for medical researchers to find research opportunities, treatment strategies, and similarities. To compare sets of clinical trials is a difficult and time-consuming task due to the heterogeneity of formats within trials.

We are designing an adaptive visualization tool aimed at improving the human experience of understanding collections of related clinical trials.

We have followed a user centered design approach to ensure the usefulness and usability of the tool. We have gone through the development of low to medium fidelity mockups to communicate ideas with our users and explore alternative representations of the data.

CTeXplorer is a prototype that contains the main ideas we have explored so far, this prototype has been an excellent communication media and we are about to start the implementation of these ideas in a web-based adaptive application.

We have also exposed our prototype to preliminary evaluations from evaluators with different backgrounds. The constant input from the user and evaluations from peers and mentors give us a good indication that we are on the right path to achieve a useful design.


CTeXplorer was developed with support from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology.