NMO Galaxy

Developed by Khawai.

This data visualization presents the connections among the 335 authors who published clinical research articles in the scientific literature concerning neuromyelitis optica (NMO) between January 1995 and November 2015.

NMO research activity surged after the discovery of antibodies directed against aquaporin 4 in 2004 and 2005, which helped to distinguish NMO from MS and provided new insights into the pathogenesis of the disease. Since then there has been a dramatic increase in NMO research, conducted not only to understand the disease but also to either develop new NMO drugs (such as aquaporumab, a drug candidate not yet in clinical testing) or look for existing drugs that might help (such as eculizumab).

Each circle represents an author. Its size is a function of the number of published articles and the author's rank compared to that of others. For each paper, we've given the first author a weight of 5, while co-authors have a weight of 1. (This reflects the author order convention in clinical study reports, in which is the first author typically is the principal investigator.) The area of the circle represents the sum of the weights. Each link represents a collaboration between two authors.

Force-Directed graphs, such as this, offer a helpful perspective by clustering the circles and thus revealing trends. However the large amount of data displayed can make it hard to analyze.

We added interactive features to improve the readability :

• Mouse over the circle to highlight the links with co-authors and display each author's name. The names of the 7 most prolific authors are permanently displayed.
• Click and drag the circle to animate the graph. When clicked, the circle becomes orange and "sticky," which allows you to reshape the layout. Double-click to cancel.
• Find a specific author using the drop-down menu. The corresponding circle will be highlighted in yellow.

The data come from a PubMed search for “Neuromyelitis Optica” or “NMO” or “Devic’s disease” or “Devic’s syndrome” limited to article types of “clinical trial”. This search generated 61 results. The abstracts were curated individually to select only the relevant papers relating to people diagnosed with neuromyelitis optica for a final total of 44 papers reporting clinical trial results..

For all of you who want to dive deeper into the data, there is a link at the bottom of the graphic to a spreadsheet listing the studies.