The primary goal of this research is to develop a specialized software tool to help the clinical investigator explore complex, time-oriented clinical data. In Phase I, we plan to collaborate with investigators from the Developmental Epidemiology Network to select data analysis, summarization, and display techniques appropriate to their research, to implement these techniques in prototype form and evaluate their utility in connection with a large database of measurements on pre-term newborns. The major technical innovation in this project is expected to be the development of an object-oriented software system that can handle the full complexity of clinical data and give the clinical investigator the ability to use advanced graphical techniques to help generate and evaluate hypotheses about the data. The major health-related contribution is hoped to be an increase in the ability of the clinician to perceive subtle trends and interrelationships in patient data. Our experience in Phase I will become the basis of a Phase II proposal to develop a prototype software product for wider evaluation and validation. The proposed software has strong commercial appeal in providing more powerful information-handling capabilities to investigators in clinical studies and clinical trials worldwide.
