Discovering medical knowledge using visual analytics: a survey on methods for systems biology and *-omics data

Due to advanced technologies, the amount of biomedical data has been increasing drastically. Such large data sets might be obtained from hospitals, medical practices or laboratories and can be used to discover unknown knowledge and to find and reflect hypotheses. Based on this fact, knowledge discovery systems can support experts to make further decisions, explore the data or to predict future events. To analyze and communicate such a vast amount of information to the user, advanced techniques such as knowledge discovery and information visualization are necessary. Visual analytics combines these fields and supports users to integrate domain knowledge into the knowledge discovery process. This article gives a state-of-the-art overview on visual analytics reseach with a focus on the biomedical domain, systems biology and *omics data.