CHOIRBM: An R package for exploratory data analysis and interactive visualization of pain patient body map data

Body maps are commonly used to capture the location of a patient's pain and thus reflect the extent of pain throughout the body. With increasing electronic capture body map information, there is an emerging need for clinic- and research-ready tools capable of visualizing this data on individual and mass scales. Here we propose CHOIRBM, an extensible and modular R package and companion web application built on the grammar of graphics system. CHOIRBM provides functions that simplify the process of analyzing and plotting patient body map data integrated from the CHOIR Body Map (CBM) at both individual patient and large-dataset levels. CHOIRBM is built on the popular R graphics package, ggplot2, which facilitates further development and addition of functionality by the open-source development community as future requirements arise. The CHOIRBM package is distributed under the terms of the MIT license and is available on CRAN. The development version of the package with the latest functions may be installed from GitHub. Example analysis using CHOIRBM demonstrates the functionality of the modular R package and highlights both the clinical and research utility of efficiently producing CBM visualizations. Author summary The number of patients with chronic pain conditions has steadily and dramatically increased over time, leading to immense individual and societal burden. To better study and improve treatments for these conditions, it is important to develop methods for characterizing the patients' pain. Central to this effort is describing the location and distribution of pain throughout each patient's body. Body maps are visual methods that efficiently and effectively facilitate capturing the location and extent of a patient's pain and can be readily integrated with electronic data capture systems. As electronic health records have become the cornerstone of patient care, there is an emerging need for clinic- and research-ready tools to visualize body-map data on individual and mass scales. To address this need, Stanford researchers developed and validated the CHOIR Body Map for capturing the locations and distribution of a given patient's pain, and we developed the CHOIRBM R package for analyzing the data. The CHOIRBM software provides functions for analyzing or visualizing individual body maps and large-scale data sets for comparisons across groups such as demographics or pain conditions. In addition, we built CHOIRBM with the popular R graphics package ggplot2 to facilitate further development or customization as future needs arise.