Poster Presentation Biobanking - Blue Sky Horizons (ABNA 19th Annual Conference)

A Demonstration of Immersive Analytics of Biospecimen Derived Data: Introducing Virtual Reality for the Observation of Oncology Models (VROOM) (#8)

Daniel R Catchpoole 1 2 , Chng Wei Lau 3 , Zhonglin Qu 3 , Andrew Johnston 2 , Simeon Simoff 3 , Quang Vinh Nguyen 3 , Paul J Kennedy 2
  1. The Tumour Bank, CCRU, Kids Research, The Sydney Children's Hospital Network, Westmead, NSW, Australia
  2. School of Computer Science, The University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia
  3. School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences, Western Sydney University, Australia, Western Sydney University, Parramatta, NSW, Australia

As biobanking operations develop to facilitate biospecimen management that integrates with data generation technologies as well as data analytics pipelines, understanding biospeciment from a health informatics viewpoint is vital. The significant advancement of inexpensive and portable virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices has re-energised the research in the immersive analytics field. The immersive environment is different from a traditional 2D display used to analyse 3D data as it provides a unified environment that supports immersion in a 3D scene, gestural interaction, haptic feedback and spatial audio. Genomic data analysis has been used in oncology to understand better the relationship between genetic profile of biospecimens, cancer type, and treatment option. We shall describe, and indeed demonstrate, a novel immersive analytics tool for cancer patient cohorts in a virtual reality environment, Virtual Reality to Observe Oncology data Models (VROOM) (1). We utilise immersive technologies to explore the tumour sample gene expression linked to patient clinical data in a cohort of cancer patients. Various machine learning algorithms and visualisation methods have also been deployed in VR to enhance the data interrogation process. This is supported with established 2D visual analytics and graphical methods in bioinformatics, such as scatter plots, descriptive statistical information, linear regression, box plot and heatmap into our visualisation. Our approach allows the analysts to interrogate the information that is familiar and meaningful to them while providing them immersive analytics capabilities to make new discoveries toward personalised medicine.

  1. Chng Wei Lau, Zhonglin Qu, Daniel Draper, Rosa Quan, Ali Braytee, Andrew Bluff, Dongmo Zhang, Andrew Johnston, Paul J. Kennedy, Simeon Simoff, Quang Vinh Nguyen, Daniel Catchpoole, “Virtual Reality for the Observation of Oncology Models (VROOM): Immersive Analytics for Oncology Patient Cohorts.”, Scientific Reports, 12, 11337, 2022.