Research and Exploratory Analysis Driven—Time-data Visualization (read-tv) software

Del Gaizo, John; Catchpole, Ken R; Alekseyenko, Alexander V

MOTIVATION: Research & Exploratory Analysis Driven Time-data Visualization (read-tv) is an open source R Shiny application for visualizing irregularly and regularly spaced longitudinal data. read-tv provides unique filtering and changepoint analysis (CPA) features. The need for these analyses was motivated by research of surgical work-flow disruptions in operating room settings. Specifically, for the analysis of the causes and characteristics of periods of high disruption-rates, which are associated with adverse surgical outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: read-tv is a graphical application, and the main component of a package of the same name. read-tv generates and evaluates code to filter and visualize data. Users can view the visualization code from within the application, which facilitates reproducibility. The data input requirements are simple, a table with a time column with no missing values. The input can either be in the form of a file, or an in-memory dataframe– which is effective for rapid visualization during curation. RESULTS: We used read-tv to automatically detect surgical disruption cascades. We found that the most common disruption type during a cascade was training, followed by equipment. DISCUSSION: read-tv fills a need for visualization software of surgical disruptions and other longitudinal data. Every visualization is reproducible, the exact source code that read-tv executes to create a visualization is available from within the application. read-tv is generalizable, it can plot any tabular dataset given the simple requirements that there is a numeric, datetime, or datetime string column with no missing values. Finally, the tab-based architecture of read-tv is easily extensible, it is relatively simple to add new functionality by implementing a tab in the source code. CONCLUSION: read-tv enables quick identification of patterns through customizable longitudinal plots; faceting; CPA; and user-specified filters. The package is available on GitHub under an MIT license.