Keywords: Visual analytics, open source
Clinical trial safety data present many challenges with regards to analysis and interpretation. Tabular outputs that are often used for safety data lead to large volumes of output resulting in challenges in generation, assessment, validation, assembly, comprehension and communication of safety findings. Visual analytics present a useful alternative to tabular outputs for exploring safety data and present a great opportunity to enhance evaluation of drug safety. This can play a big role in facilitating communication of safety results with regulators, investigators, data monitoring committee, and other stakeholders and help convey multiple pieces of information concisely and more effectively than tables. In this discussion, we consider how visual analytics can enhancing graphical outputs and how in complements computation and visualization to perform effective analyses of safety data in order to get maximum gain in interpretation of these data. Readily available open source tools for visual analytics of clinical trial safety data will also be highlighted.