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Figure 1 | EPJ Data Science

Figure 1

From: The network positions of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus affected units in a regional healthcare system

Figure 1

Ridiculogram of the patient flow. This is a visualization of the entire patient flow in the hospital system of the 8,507 units that at some point has an MRSA infected patient. It is created by a spring-embedding algorithm that forces nodes (units) exchanging many patients to be close. In this visualization, the nodes are not directly visible, only the links. The darker colors represent stronger overlap. We can see that the system is strongly connected and the hierarchical administrative organizations are not very clearly reflected in the patient flow. At the same time, there is more structure than in a purely random network which would look uniform in this type of plot - the dark blobs corresponds more or less to the major hospitals (we do not have information about what larger unit that a unit belongs to). This type of visualization should not be overinterpreted (which is often the case, hence the sobriquet “ridiculogram”). To understand the structure of the unit network, we need network metrics, which is the topic of the paper.

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