Visual Analytics: Leveraging Cognitive Principles to Accelerate Biomedical Discoveries

The exponential growth of biomedical information far exceeds our cognitive abilities to comprehend it for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of complex diseases. This chapter discusses the cognitive and task-based reasons for why methods from visual analytics can help in analyzing such large and complex data, and demonstrates how one such approach called network visualization and analysis can be used to reveal important translational insights. The demonstration of the method helps to identify the strengths and limitations of network analysis, in addition to areas for future research that can enhance the use of networks to analyze vast and complex biomedical datasets related to complex diseases.