Biomarker data visualisation for decision making in clinical trials

Objective: To understand how visualization of biomarker data is used for decision making in clinical trials, and identify problems with and suggest improvements to this process.

Methods: We carried out semi-structured interviews with 18 professionals involved in various aspects of developing or using visualizations of biomarker data for decision making in clinical trials. We used an inductive thematic analysis to identify implicit and explicit ideas within the data captured from the interviews.

Results: We identified 6 primary themes, including: how visualizations were used in clinical trials; the importance of having a clear understanding of the underlying data; the purpose or use of the visualization, and the properties of the visualizations themselves. The results show that participants' 'trust' in the visualization depends on access to the underlying data, and that there is currently no standard or straightforward way to support this access.

Conclusions: Incorporating information about data provenance into biomarker-related visualizations used for decision making in clinical trials may increase users' trust, and therefore facilitate the decision making process.