VACS 2.0: Visual Analysis for Cohort Studies (Visual Analysis of Time-varying High-dimensional Heterogeneous and Incomplete Data with Application to Population-based Studies)

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Lars Linsen; Professor Dr. Henry Völzke
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 310876543

Clinical practice often focuses on the investigation of one single disease, while the health status of a human is much more complex and may depend on many factors. Recently, cohort studies have been introduced to investigate, in longitudinal studies, the health status of an entire population (the cohort) by capturing health record data, whole-body medical imaging data, personal data including socio-economical circumstances, and even genetic sequencing data. Given this large amount of heterogeneous data, there is a lack of proper tools for its multi-variate analysis. In this project, we propose novel interactive visual analysis methods for testing hypotheses, supporting the generation of new hypotheses, and investigating changes over time. The goal is to allow for the detection of risk or biomarkers and even genetic associations in a multi-variate setting.In the second funding period, the research conducted in the first funding period shall be enhanced in various aspects. We will put a particular focus on the time aspect in multi-dimensional heterogeneous data from longitudinal studies, the analysis of influencing factors, analyzing multi-dimensional heterogeneous data with missing entries, and analyzing sparse high-dimensional data from genome-wide association studies.Moreover, we would like to validate the effectiveness of the proposed analysis methods by performing comparative visual analyses of the multi-dimensional heterogeneous data from different cohort studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants