Radial Visualization Model in Healthcare: A Survey

One of the main focuses of research in healthcare involves the processing of large amounts of data accumulated in Electronic Health Records and their communication in an interactive, understandable, and adequate way to the needs of each user, either healthcare professionals, patients, or care givers. One way of conveying the information to all of them is in a graphical way. There are, traditionally, two types of graphic models for data presentation: Cartesian/linear mod- els and radial models. From literature one can observe that there is an increasing interest in radial models to analyze and present large amounts of data. In this paper an exploratory study is presented aiming to understand how radial visualization model evolved throughout history, as well as its importance and relevance in data visualization with a particular interest in clinical data. The methodology used is focused on case studies found in literature, collecting all the relevant references about the radial visualization model and conclude on their weaknesses and strengths.