Trent Walker, Medical Student, Ohio State University College of Medicine
Benjamin Kaffenberger, Doctor, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Disease often shows a predilection for specific site locations. To demonstrate the body regions involved, researchers may use infographics or tables. While tables may be more descriptive and universal to any statistical software, heat maps rapidly communicate disease involvement across a cohort. At our institution, software to portray data into the confines of a human body is not readily available. Additionally, we needed the human body to be segmented into specific regions. While a graphic editor can be used, it is labor intensive, limits generalizability, and cannot be repeated with different data sets.
To create a scalable solution, we used the Custom Map Creator in JMP, an add-in to Graph Builder that allows users to create custom shapes. With this program, we outlined a human body, created anatomic regions, and colored each region based on the percentage of occurrence. The selected color range is scaled to directly correlate with the data. Each anatomical subunit is then filled and shaded by the data in the respective column. Heat maps provide easy interpretation and clearly portray the most involved areas for rapid communication to readers.