One of the biggest challenges in HEREDITARY is not only to collect and secure integrate data, but also to make sense of it.
Researchers, clinicians, policymakers and citizens are increasingly confronted with vast amounts of information coming from medical images, genetic data, microbiome profiles, electronic health records, simulations and many other sources. While these datasets hold enormous potential to advance our understanding of health and disease, their complexity can make them difficult to interpret and use effectively.
This is where HEREDITARY’s Work Package 5 (WP5), coordinated by TU Graz, comes in. Through the development of innovative visual analytics methods and interactive exploration tools, WP5 helps transform complex multimodal data into understandable insights that can support research, prevention and decision-making across the healthcare ecosystem.
Today, we are excited to showcase a big result coming from this work: the launch of the HEREDITARY Demos & Visualisation Components Portal, publicly available at: https://demos.hereditary-project.eu/.
From research prototypes to publicly accessible demonstrators
Over the last two years, WP5 has progressively transformed visualisation concepts into operational demonstrators and interactive applications.
The developments reported in a series of deliverables (D5.1, D5.2, D5.3 & D5.4) include visualisation components for:
- High-dimensional biomedical data.
- Knowledge graphs and semantic resources.
- Brain imaging and spatial data.
- Time-series and biosignal analysis.
- Simulation and modelling outputs.
- Natural language-assisted visual analytics.
A key principle throughout this work has been openness and reusability. To make these developments accessible to a broader audience, TU Graz has established a dedicated demonstrator infrastructure that hosts and deploys visual analytics applications developed within HEREDITARY. The new Demos & Visualisation Components Portal now brings many of these innovations together in a single public entry point.
Created through close collaboration between TU Graz and partners across the consortium, including experts in medical research, federated infrastructures, machine learning, data management and semantic technologies, the portal demonstrates how advanced visual analytics can support the exploration of multimodal health data. The portal currently includes 15 demonstrators, videos (in some cases) and code (available in most of them), from semantic exploration and cohort analysis to brain imaging, machine learning interpretation and simulation-based research.
Exploring the gut-brain connection through visual analytics
Among the flagship developments showcased in the portal is the Gut Brain Explorer, an advanced visual analytics application designed to explore relationships between gut microbiota and brain activity.
The tool combines multiple linked visualisations to allow researchers to investigate outputs generated through Linked Independent Component Analysis (LICA), integrating microbiome information with functional brain imaging data. Users can interactively explore microbiota distributions, modality contributions and brain activity patterns through coordinated views.
The component has already demonstrated its scientific value during project evaluations, supporting researchers in identifying biologically relevant gut-brain associations.
Making complex biomedical data easier to explore
Several other demonstrators address complementary challenges in data exploration and interpretation.
Clusters in Focus helps researchers identify and compare meaningful patient subgroups within high-dimensional biomedical datasets, supporting tasks such as biomarker discovery and phenotyping.
Neurodegen-Vis combines interactive visual analytics with LLM-powered assistance to support the exploration of healthcare datasets. The tool enables users to investigate correlations and dependencies in medical data while receiving guidance through natural language interaction. Privacy-preserving mechanisms are integrated to protect sensitive information.
OnSET (Ontology and Semantic Exploration Toolkit) helps users navigate complex knowledge graphs and ontologies through natural language querying and visual graph exploration, making semantic resources more accessible to non-experts.
Building trust through transparency and interaction
One of HEREDITARY’s core ambitions is to ensure that advanced AI and data-driven methods remain understandable and trustworthy for the people who use them. Visualisation plays a crucial role in achieving this goal.
By allowing users to interact directly with data, inspect results, understand relationships and explore evidence behind conclusions, visual analytics can help make complex technologies more transparent and interpretable. This is particularly important in healthcare, where trust, explainability and human oversight remain essential.
As HEREDITARY progresses, new demonstrators and functionalities will continue to be added, further expanding the ecosystem of tools available for exploring multimodal biomedical data, semantic resources and AI-driven analyses.
🔗 Explore all the demonstrators and get in touch with the team responsible for each one: https://demos.hereditary-project.eu/
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