Cheyne-Stoke Respiration

Cheyne-Stokes respiration graphic

One can create art with data, many have proven that with beautiful infographics or dazzling company reports. I thought using R to create an artistic rendering of a normally mundane process would be neat. I developed a graphic based on Cheyne-Stokes respiration using ggplot.

I think the resulting work (right) has a sci-fi feel to it (think Galactic Empire from Star Wars), almost like it could be a symbol for a corporation should the sinusoidal lobes be made solid. Below I have included the full code needed to replicate the graph, most of it is automatic after specifying a couple of parameters. This was the main advantage of coding the design over manually creating it, I could iterate quickly until I found a look that I agreed with sans wasting a lot of time doing fine adjustments.

I won't go over the code in detail as it is largely self-explanatory (though pardon an inefficient techniques, this was a five minute job completed during a meeting). Basically I use a mirror set of times centered around zero to create a smooth, enveloped sine wave (hyperpnoea) and include bouts of no breathing (aponea). The bars to signify hyperpnoea/aponea are just modified error bars and the entire image is made more salient by shifting the coordinates to polar.

Note: The code isn't fancy (made during a meeting), so pardon the lack of efficiency or beauty at parts. The black line is the breathing rate while the red and blue interlocking lines signify aponea and hyperpnoea, respectively.