Advanced data analysis and visualization for clinical laboratory

This paper describes visualization techniques that help identify hidden structures in clinical laboratory data. The visualization of data is helpful for a rapid and better understanding of the characteristics of data sets. Various charts help the user identify trends in data. Scatter plots help prevent misinterpretations due to invalid data by identifying outliers. The representation of experimental data in figures is always useful for communicating results to others. Currently, flexible methods such as smoothing methods and latent structure analysis are available owing to the presence of advanced hardware and software. Principle component analysis, which is a well-known technique used to reduce multidimensional data sets, can be carried out on a personal computer. These methods could lead to advanced visualization with regard to exploratory data analysis. In this paper, we present 3 examples in order to introduce advanced data analysis. In the first example, a smoothing spline was fitted to a time-series from the control chart which is not in a state of statistical control. The trend line was clearly extracted from the daily measurements of the control samples. In the second example, principal component analysis was used to identify a new diagnostic indicator for Graves' disease. The multi-dimensional data obtained from patients were reduced to lower dimensions, and the principle components thus obtained summarized the variation in the data set. In the final example, a latent structure analysis for a Gaussian mixture model was used to draw complex density functions suitable for actual laboratory data. As a result, 5 clusters were extracted. The mixed density function of these clusters represented the data distribution graphically. The methods used in the above examples make the creation of complicated models for clinical laboratories more simple and flexible.