Visualising Variation in the Real-World Clinical Delivery of Chemotherapy Protocols

Abstract

Typical univariate measures of variation in chemotherapy protocols fail to capture and describe the full multi-dimensional complexity of treatment adjustments in real-world data. In this preliminary work, we propose novel visualisations of observed treatment events, as well as treatment-as-delivered relative to initial prescriptions, as a means of gaining insights into complex patterns of treatment variation in cancer patients. Simple clustering techniques were also used to confirm the utility of these visualisations and our ability to correlate observed variations with historical events.