The new DataMontage hiearchical timeline feature enables you to organize timelines within a hierarchy, so a “parent” timeline can contain lower-level “children” timelines. If a parent timeline is “closed”, its children timelines are hidden, and an unfilled triangular open/closed button is drawn next to the timeline label. If the parent timeline is “open”, its children timelines are shown, and a filled button is drawn next to the label. You can open and close each parent timeline to control which children timelines are shown. For example, an initial data display might close all of the parent timelines to provide a high-level overview of the data. You can open individual parent timelines to drill down and investigate subsets of the data in more detail. The hiearchical timeline feature is useful for displaying hiearchically-organized event data, where higher-level timelines display data for larger or more abstract parts of a system, organization, or population.

In the top module, ICD9 codes are displayed in a two-level hierarchy. There is one top-level (level 1) timeline for each range of ICD9 codes. For example, the first level 1 timeline displays a symbol to indicate the date of any diagnosis in the range 001 to 139 (infectious diseases). You can click on the timeline’s triangular button to see the lower-level (level 2) timelines. For example, if you click on the unfilled triangle to the left of timeline “001-139: Infectious”, DataMontage will display a timeline for each distinct ICD9 code in the range 001-139. The level 1 timelines are drawn using distinct background colors that help the user distinguish level 1 timelines from:

1. their associated children timelines which are displayed with white backgrounds.
2. other level 1 timelines which are displayed in another color. For example, Circulatory system ICD9 codes are drawn in a red timeline, and nervous system codes are drawn in a gray timeline. The color-coding of parent timelines that represent ICD9 code ranges is designed to reduce the need to refer to text label of each parent timeline.

In the second module, medications are grouped by drug class. Each level 1 timeline displays the timing of exposures to a drug class, and each level 2 timeline displays the timing of exposures to specific drugs, identified by the drug name, dose, and form.

The hiearchical timeline feature can be used in combination with the graph subsets feature. For example, you can right-click and select Select Subsets from the context menu to select and display only those graphs and timelines that satisfy your selection criteria.

In this example, only two levels of timelines are used. However, you can create any number of levels of timelines.

Close timelines   Open timelines