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Informing the design of a neuroscience experiment by exploring indirect relations between topics in augmented reality

human-computer-interaction
data-science
multimedia
visual-analytics

Abstract

Before conducting a costly experiment, neuroscientists need to analyse large numbers of publications to inform their design. This process is time-consuming. Topic-based literature exploration is a useful means to analyse many publications simultaneously because it provides an overview of relations between neuroscience topics. A co-occurrence of two topics, such as a brain region and a brain disease, in the same sentence in the title or abstract of a publication, implies a direct relation between them. A brain region may also be connected indirectly to a brain disease through an intermediate topic, such as a gene or a mental process. Our goal is to establish whether the task of exploring indirect relations between brain regions and diseases would assist neuroscientists in designing a useful experiment. Using a user-centred design approach, we (i) interview neuroscientists to establish the usefulness of exploring indirect relations between topics; (ii) specify the functionality required for this task, and (iii) design and implement corresponding visualisation in 3D Augmented Reality (AR). Nine neuroscientists carried out two representative tasks using the implemented functionality and corresponding visualisation. Their responses to 14 Likert-scale questions and 6 semi-structured interview questions indicated that (a) the visualisation is suitable for presenting the implemented functionality, (b) the implemented functionality is useful for exploring indirect relations, and (c) exploring indirect relations between topics is useful to help neuroscientists design a useful experiment.
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