Table 2 Comparison between the old relational system (RDB) and Graph4Med with evaluations from our end users. The figure references relate to implementation examples
From: Graph4Med: a web application and a graph database for visualizing and analyzing medical databases
Feature | RDB | Graph4Med | User comments |
|---|---|---|---|
Overview & general cohort statistics | ✗ | ✓ (Fig. 7) | In the RDB, the DB administrator queries for the desired information summarizing a patient cohort in a table from which plots are generated manually with third-party tools. This usually takes several weeks in our practice, especially, if the query has to be adapted after seeing the first version of the plot. |
Visualization of cohort/subpopulation | ✗ | ✓ (Fig. 8) | |
Visualization of relationships among patients | ✗ | ✓ (Fig. 9a) | |
Navigate through individual cases | ✓ | ✓ | |
Gather a patient profile & visualize various data of individual cases | ✗ | In the old system, users have to browse multiple tables to gather a profile of an individual case and there is no possibility of visualizing relationships among various data in such a profile (cf. Fig. 10) | |
Eliminate redundant answers | ✗ | ✓ | |
Aggregate results | ✗ | ✓ | |
Fusion-based search | ✗ | Gene fusions are the most important drivers for leukemia, and also the main bases for patient stratification, thus, searching for patients with the same fusion is very useful. | |
Patient similarity search | ✗ | ✓ (Fig. 10) |