Developing visualisation tools for complex longitudinal datasets of microbial data from children with pneumonia

The microbiota (community of microorganisms) of the upper airways plays a key role in the development of pneumonia in children. Most of the important bacterial pneumonia pathogens colonize the airways, and serve as the source of infection for pneumonia. Over the past decade, we have longitudinally studied the bacteria and viruses present in the airways in a cohort of African children in order to understand their role in the development of pneumonia ( https://thorax.bmj.com/content/70/6/592 ).

The data that will form the basis for this project are a set of quantitative measures of pathogen load for 33 different respiratory pathogens. These data have been generated by testing 2-weekly airway samples from 750 children over the first year of life. Amongst these children >450 episodes of pneumonia have occurred. This project will aim to develop advanced visualisation tools for these longitudinal data, for single pathogens as well as combinations of pathogens. This will be done to visualise summary measures as well as to visualise individual child trajectories, in order to compare these trajectories between children who do and do not develop pneumonia. The complexity of the data comes from the high dimensionality, the longitudinal nature of the data and the case-control (pneumonia vs. no pneumonia) data structure.

These visualizations will enable us to effectively explore the dataset in order to develop hypotheses around the role of individual pathogens and combinations of pathogens in the development of pneumonia in children. If successful, the visualisations will also be used for future work using further, ongoing, microbiological testing (microbiome analysis) of the same sample set.

Client


Contact: Mark Nicol
Phone: 0410584165
Email: [email protected]
Preferred contact: Email,SMS
Location: QEII Medical Centre

IP Exploitation Model


The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons ( open source ) http://creativecommons.org.au/


Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Last modified: 22 July 2019
Modified By: Michael Wise 		UWA