Assisting Neuroscientists in Exploring and Understanding Brain Topic Relations Using Augmented Reality

Exploring and investigating relations found in literature is an important process in research, but with large numbers of papers published each year, it becomes more challenging to maintain an overview of information. Immersive Analytics (IA) visualisations from the DatAR project can aid neuroscientists in performing complex relation exploration tasks such as finding semantically similar brain diseases and research topics that could explain this similarity. DatAR is able to give users some insight into why and how these diseases are similar by showing brain topics that have been frequently co-occurring together with the diseases in the literature. This insight, however, is limited as the user can not investigate the relations of brain topics nor explore them, which are important tasks for a neuroscientist in order to better understand the interrelations between brain topics. In this study we research how we can assist a neuroscientist to investigate and explore relations between brain topics in order to help them understand their interrelations and make it easier to find interesting and/or surprising relations that could prove to be a fruitful research area. Through a user-centered design approach, we formulate user tasks, user requirements and present an interface for immersive relation finding and exploring.