From Success Stories in Scientific Visualization Wiki
Many problems in public health management have complex interdependencies with factors such as education, poverty, environmental quality, safe water, clean air, climate, season, and even animal migration patterns. The Exploratory Spatio-Temporal Analysis Toolkit figure, was designed under contract from the National Cancer Institute and implemented using the GeoVISTA Studio system. The four linked views support the flexible visual exploration and analysis of geo-spatial health data and covariates across space and time. The data displays in the example show possible correlations between stage of diagnosis for cervical cancer (comparing “local stage”, meaning the cancer has not spread, and “distant stage,” meaning the cancer is found in other organs) in women across the economically disadvantaged Appalachian counties in PA, WV, and KY. The scatterplot in the upper left section shows income against distant stage diagnosis for breast cancer. Existing visualization tools have already empowered public health officials with the capability to trace such factors and study their relationships, but they do not go far enough. Innovative responses in public health management require that we develop integrated visualization systems that will enable officials to pull together traditional and non-traditional information to explore the relationships between disease factors and to create policies and programs that respond to the essential causes of health problems and not just the effects.
A.C. Robinson, J. Chen, H.G. Meyer, and A.M. MacEachren. "Human-centered design of geovisualization tools for cancer epidemiology." In Proc. GIScience, pp. 314–316. 2004.
