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Introduction
Almost all HIV infections in children are secondary to mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of the virus. In the past decade, the United States and other resource-rich countries have enjoyed a dramatic decrease in the incidence of new pediatric AIDS due to the institution of preventive strategies such as perinatal highly active anti-retroviral therapy and elective cesarean delivery. In resource-limited countries and in particular segments of the United States population (e.g., women lacking prenatal care), however, MTCT remains a grave problem.
These countries are only just beginning to implement MTCT prevention programs, and are doing so using very different standards of practice from resource-rich countries. Many and varied trials have been conducted on the prevention of MTCT in countries with advanced as well as rudimentary health care systems.
A clear picture of MTCT preventive strategies is needed, while making comparisons across these trials is quite complex. What strategies have been studied in whom and where? Where is there sufficient evidence across trials to inform public policy, and conversely, where should additional studies or analyses be performed to generate informative evidence?
CTeXplorer is a visualization tool that uses computable trial information in Trial Bank to allow people to compare, contrast, and understand a group of clinically related trials. This first version of CTeXplorer includes only selected information on study design; future versions will include trial results. Although we are developing and testing CTeXplorer with trials from the HIV domain, CTeXplorer is built for visualizing trials from all clinical domains.
Data
The visualization tool you are about to test is a prototype. It contains data extracted from 12 randomized MTCT trials conducted in recent years in several countries (country information is not displayed).
The MTCT trials used to test our design contain the following data: a subset of the eligibility criteria, interventions, sample size, primary outcome and a subset of safety outcomes. For the interventions, dosage information is not displayed. For outcomes, the prototype shows time points of evaluation up to 12 weeks after birth.
Description
The approach selected for the design of CTeXplorer employs linked views, each tailored to the type of data being visualized. Dynamic queries are provided using sliders and check boxes. Regardless of the view being queried, the query filters trials globally, and all views are updated to reflect this filtering.
The main user interface contains three linked views: Eligibility Criteria View, Interventions View, and Outcomes View. The views are ordered from top to bottom and left to right in a logical progression from trial setup to conclusion. The main interface contains also one static view, the Geographical View to represent trials by geographical location.
There are resizing capabilities between windows to allow users to focus on a specific view. Each view can be dynamically expanded to use the entire window, see below.
