VlaaiVisAbout a year and a half ago, we started working on a project to implement a new kind of visualisation method for my current employer, Johnson & Johnson.The goal was to visualize very wide sets of data in a very condensed way to simplify the analysis process. Trevor Howe came up with the concept of a pie barchart diagram he named VlaaiVis (see image on the right). The basic idea is that you can define a ‘preferred profile’, the boundaries within which the data values are satisfactory to you, and the data will be visualized relative to this profile. Every row in the dataset is a pie, and the closer a bar is to the outer rim, the better the value for that column fits your profile.

The other members of the development team for this project were Max Hillaert, Alain Hufkens, Raf Franco and Gabriel Lozano-Moràn. Pieter Vugts and Christophe De Baene created the initial proof-of-concept application.

The department recently decided to make the application publicly available, and the website has gone public now.

From the VlaaiVis website:

VlaaiVis is a visualisation tool originally developed for multifactorial structure activity relationship (SAR) data. Each circle represents a single compound and each slice of the ‘pie’ represents a normalised response to a particular assay or property. An unlimited number of compounds may be visualised simultaneously. The tool seeks to provide a simple and rapid visualisation of single or multiple compounds during any phase of the drug discovery process. In a broader sense, it fits any kind of data for which a target preferred profile could be determined.

If you’re interested, you can download a free version, more information on how VlaaiVis works can be found in the online help pages.