Translational researchers use clinical trials to understand the causal interactions between diseases, treatments, and patient outcomes. MedicineMaps is a web application that helps translational researchers to track the causal information they glean from clinical trials.

Screenshot of MedicineMaps interface

MedicineMaps is based on a web app called ResearchMaps. ResearchMaps is designed to help biologists track causal relations reported in biological literature. With MedicineMaps, we’ve adapted the concepts behind ResearchMaps, tailoring them to the needs of translational researchers who want to summarize evidence across multiple clinical trials. At its highest level of abstraction, our representation for clinical trials has three elements:

An intervention is a treatment given to a patient who suffers from a condition. A relation is directed relationship that describes an intervention’s effect on an outcome. And an outcome is an operationalized measure of a patient’s response to an intervention.

About the demo

We’re using MedicineMaps to study the role that statins could have in treating cognitive deficits associated with RASopathies, such as Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). Animal models suggest that statins could treat cognitive deficits in NF1, but studies in humans have shown mixed results. To explore this issue, we used MedicineMaps to annotate studies of statins’ effects on various cognitive measures in NF1 patients. With each study’s metadata, MedicineMaps visualizes methodological differences across studies to contextualize their results. These visualizations could help researchers to design new studies that will inform how this disease is treated. Click “Begin demo” to explore the literature on statins.

Begin demo

This site is a demo of MedicineMaps, prepared for the AMIA 2016 Symposium. You can download a PDF of our poster for this conference.