Visual Analytics Meet Healthcare: A Discourse on the Prospects and Potentialities
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 | 2.00–3.30 pm | Ernst-Abbe Saal, Volkshaus Jena
| Abstract | Physicians are confronted with complex patients’ histories and treatment options based on which they need to make life-critical treatment decisions. Clinical researchers are eager to study these growing databases of patients’ histories (also known as Electronic Health Records (EHRs)) to detect expected and discover unexpected patterns, ensure quality control, and discover surprising outcomes. At the same time, nurses and patients have other needs and tasks to accomplish. Visual Analytics (VA) may ease the overall information discovery process. VA aims at enabling the exploration and understanding of large and complex data sets by intertwining interactive visualization, data analysis, human-computer interaction, as well as cognitive and perceptual science. In this talk, I will illustrate the different aspects of EHRs, in particular, the characteristics of time and time-oriented data. A particular focus will be put on the main goal of VA – the facilitation of deeper insights into huge heterogeneous data resources, which can be achieved by considering (1) the characteristics of the data, (2) the users, and (3) the users’ tasks and needs. I will give several examples of VA solutions and sketch the main challenges and opportunities within healthcare, which range from scalable VA approaches from single patients to cohorts, intertwining patients’ conditions with executed treatments (according to a knowledge-assisted visualization paradigm) to guidance in VA. |
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| Speaker | Silvia Miksch |
| Date | Wednesday, September 10, 2025 |
| Time | 2.00–3.30 pm |
| Location | Ernst-Abbe Saal, Volkshaus Jena |
Silvia Miksch | Centre for Visual Analytics Science and Technology
Silvia Miksch is a university professor and head of the research unit "Visual Analytics" (Centre for Visual Analytics Science and Technology (CVAST)), which is part of Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Faculty of Informatics, Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology. She has served on various program committees of international scientific conferences (paper co-chair of the IEEE VAST 2010, 2011, 2020, EG EuroVis 2012, etc.), belong(ed) belongs / was on the editorial board of IEEE TVCG, CGF, etc., and participated in various strategic and guiding committees, such as the VAST steering committee and the VIS Executive Committee (VEC). Currently, she is Chair of the EuroVis steering committee. In 2020, she was inducted into the IEEE Visualization Academy (or in short, Vis Academy). The Vis Academy was established in 2018 by the IEEE VGTC Executive Committee. Inclusion into the Vis Academy is the highest and most prestigious honor in the field of visualization. In 2023 she was honored for outstanding technical contributions to VA of time-varying data with the prestigious IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award.
She has more than 300 scientific publications, and her main research interests are visualization and visual analytics over time and space, with a particular focus on interaction techniques, network-based, knowledge-assisted, and guidance-enriched methods. Her overarching application fields are healthcare, digital humanities/arts, financial fraud detection, etc.