The healthcare field has always been a favorite for analyst and data experts. The field is abundantly rich with large data sets and values, what we now call the “Big Data”. Analyzing large and multi-dimensional data in the field of genetics, genomes and biotech has always been a challenging task for analysts.
Most of the times, clinical data sets have a lot of fields and unstructured data. Healthcare data visualizations can be tricky and need utmost care in selecting the relevant data fields, measures and indicators. Because there is so much data involved, its structuring and visualization is a challenging process in itself. In a pile, full of insights, understanding the business needs of the clinical data and presenting them becomes difficult for technical experts like us. Data could be of various types like DNA types, Gene types, genome classification, disease virus classification etc. The person involved in creating visualizations and analysis may or may not have been acquainted with these terms biological and its significance. Hence, analysis of healthcare data becomes even more difficult. With various tools and software available in the market for data visualizations, one of them has stood out in terms of health care data.
Circos is an open source software package for visualizing data and information that visualizes data in circular layout is mostly advertised for data visualizations that have complex relationships between objects or positions. Circos is ideal for creating visualizations and illustrations with a high data-to-ink ratio [1] and multi layered data attributes making it ideal for clinical data analysis. Thus, for a data science professional in the field of health care and biotechnology , Circos is touted to play a very important part in making their tasks simpler.
References: http://circos.ca/
http://www.mastersindatascience.org/blog/10-cool-big-data-visualizations/