Megaplots is an R package that provides an interactive Shiny application for visualizing individual-level longitudinal data in clinical trials.
A megaplot provides a large-scale graphical display in which every subject’s event history is rendered on a single canvas, making it straightforward to identify patterns, outliers, and safety signals across the full course of a study.
The package is aimed at data scientists and statisticians to explore subject-level events and measurements across the full duration of a trial. It is designed to support exploratory data analysis and safety review in early and late-phase studies.
- Subject-level timelines — one row per subject, spanning the entire observation period, with events rendered as colour-coded bars.
- Interactive controls — filter by treatment arm, study visit, event type, or any variable in the dataset via a reactive sidebar.
- Multi-domain overlays — overlay adverse events, lab abnormalities, and concomitant medications on the same timeline for each subject.
- Sorting and grouping — Cohort-level organisation controls.
- Event-driven seriation — sequence subjects along the y-axis by the timing of a user-selected anchor event, revealing temporal patterns and relationships that fixed ordering would obscure.
- Themeable — customise colour palettes and lane ordering to match your organisation’s style guide.
The main panel displays a subject-level timeline plot in which each row corresponds to a single trial participant. Events are rendered as colour-coded markers along a continuous time axis — typically study day allowing the reviewer to scan the full cohort at a glance and immediately spot clusters of adverse events, early discontinuations, or dose modifications.
The sidebar on the left provides reactive sorting functionalities,
grouping and filter controls: select one or more treatment arms,
restrict the view to a specific study visit window, or drill down to
individual subjects by identifier. Several options making it
straightforward to compare subgroups or isolate a subject of interest
during a safety review meeting. With the numerous options, its easier
than ever to customize the plot appearance.
Megaplots is not yet on CRAN. You can install the development version from GitHub with either of the following:
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("Bayer-Group/BIC-megaplots")library(Megaplots)
# Launch the interactive Shiny application
run_app()The app opens in your default browser.
| Function | Description |
|---|---|
run_app() |
Launches the Megaplots Shiny application |
Detailed documentation can be found in the Tutorial document in this repository and included within the app.
Contributions of all kinds are welcome — bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests. Please read CONTRIBUTING before getting started, and note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating you agree to abide by its terms.
To report a bug or request a feature, please open an issue.
Megaplots is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3).