Disease Universe: Visualisation of Population-Wide Disease-Wide Associations

Abstract

Over a lifespan, a human organism is affected by multiple disorders of different origin and severity. We apply a force-directed spring embedding graph layout approach to electronic health records in order to visualise population-wide associations among human disorders as presented in an individual biological organism. The introduced visualisation is implemented on the basis of the Google maps platform and can be found at http://disease-map.net. We argue that the suggested method of visualisation can both validate already known specifics of associations among disorders and identify novel, never noticed association patterns.