MEDVIR: 3D visual interface applied to gene profile analisys.

The origins for this work arise in response to the increasing need for biologists and doctors to obtain tools for visual analysis of data. When dealing with multidimensional data, such as medical data, the traditional data mining techniques can be a tedious and complex task, even to some medical experts. Therefore, it is necessary to develop useful visualization techniques that can complement the expert’s criterion, and at the same time visually stimulate and make easier the process of obtaining knowledge from a dataset. Thus, the process of interpretation and understanding of the data can be greatly enriched. Multidimensionality is inherent to any medical data, requiring a time-consuming effort to get a clinical useful outcome. Unfortunately, both clinicians and biologists are not trained in managing more than four dimensions. Specifically, we were aimed to design a 3D visual interface for gene profile analysis easy in order to be used both by medical and biologist experts. In this way, a new analysis method is proposed: MedVir. This is a simple and intuitive analysis mechanism based on the visualization of any multidimensional medical data in a three dimensional space that allows interaction with experts in order to collaborate and enrich this representation. In other words, MedVir makes a powerful reduction in data dimensionality in order to represent the original information into a three dimensional environment. The experts can interact with the data and draw conclusions in a visual and quickly way.