Pathline

Pathline is a visualization tool for genetic data created in collaboration between designers and geneticists:

We recently attended an interdisciplinary visualization workshop that was all about creating a dialogue between scientists, technologists and designers. It was interesting to discuss the different ways in which these groups think about visualization and how they use it for different purposes. Very bluntly put, each group lacks something another group knows and cares deeply about, be it an understanding of colour [we met in the UK] or an understanding of statistics.

The before and after images show a striking simplification that apparently helps even trained geneticists:

Two main advantages of the new tool were found. First, there was a massive gain in efficiency. The study of a heatmap took up to a half-hour before but can be done at a glance at the curvemap now. More importantly, though, the scientists made new discoveries of gene properties they didn’t know about before. What was hidden in the data before, is now very clear, even to an untrained eye.