Designing a Topic-Based Literature Exploration Tool in AR-An exploratory study for neuroscience

Abstract

The large and increasing amount of scientific literature makes it difficult for researchers to analyse and understand relations between topics even in their specific sub-field. Neuroscience researchers are interested in relations between, for example, anatomical regions of the brain and the diseases that affect them. To explore relations in the extensive body of literature, using the topics themselves rather than individual articles, can provide a higher-level approach. We have created a prototype interactive AR environment to learn more about how topic-based literature browsing might aid researchers in analysing and understanding relations between topics. Given the three-dimensional nature of the brain, we postulate that visualizing neuroscience topics in Augmented Reality would support the exploration of relations between them and thus improve and extend existing literature exploration workflows. We follow a user-centered approach to identify visualization and interaction design requirements. Using an existing analysis of tens of thousands of neuroscience papers, we designed an interactive AR environment to support researchers in finding relations between brain regions and brain diseases that integrates with existing literature review practices. We carried out two qualitative evaluations to verify our design, first with eight neuroscience students as domain experts and then with seven experienced researchers as literature exploration experts. Our analysis of participants' feedback shows that visualizing topics and their relations in the immersive AR environment is clear, understandable and helpful for topic-based literature exploration, specifically, between brain regions and brain diseases. Our AR literature exploration tool has the potential to be used by neuroscientists in their routine literature reviews.