R Shiny in Life Sciences - Top 7 Dashboard Examples
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Explore 7 exciting examples of R Shiny dashboards in the life sciences! R Shiny is one of the easiest ways for developers to make production-ready dashboards when speed and functionality are crucial. Shiny is approachable with a lot of documentation available, and because of this, a lot of developers/researchers with non-coding backgrounds are able to produce some impressive results. The whole ecosystem is easy to get your head around and pretty much limitless with regard to what you can do.
2023 Shiny in Life Sciences Update:
Since 2022, a lot has happened in the world of Shiny and the Life Sciences. Things move fast, and adoption of R Shiny (and now Python for Shiny) is ramping up. With this in mind, we've added a few more Shiny examples from our Life Sciences collection. However, many new apps and dashboards are constantly emerging, and we strive to publish the most unique and exciting ones in the Shiny Weekly Newsletter - so be sure to subscribe! We've kept the original 7 apps shown below, but added a few more at the top of the list:- RConsortium's FDA Pilot 2 - Rewritten in Rhino
- Shiny Gosling - Genomics Data Visualizations
- Drug Interactions Exploration Tool
- DrawCell - Cell Illustrations Simplified
Stuck in a Python vs R analysis paralysis? Read our take on Python Dash vs R Shiny.Here’s a list of the top 7 dashboards made with R Shiny in life sciences:
- RStudio: Covid-19 Tracker
- RStudio: Genome Browser
- RStudio: ShinyMRI
- Appsilon: Bee Colonies
- FielDHub: Designing Experiments in R Shiny
- CSBB: Computational Suite for Bioinformaticians and Biologists
- GraphBio: Visualization Analysis for Omics Data
2023 Shiny Apps and Dashboard Examples in the Life Sciences
RConsortium's FDA Pilot 2 - Rewritten in Rhino
The FDA Pilot 2 Rhino rewrite features the RConsortium Submissions Working Group's Pilot 2 app, which was successfully submited in 2023! The Shiny app, built with teal modules, demonstrates clinical trial data analysis and visualization and originally used Golem. For the rebuild, we chose Rhino, an enterprise-level framework, supports clear code, comprehensive testing, and automation, making it well-suited for highly regulated environments and drug development processes.
Shiny Gosling - Genomics Data Visualizations
Shiny Gosling demonstrates the features of Gosling.js made available in R Shiny by the shiny.gosling package. Users can now access scalable and interactive genomics data visualizations in their Shiny apps and dashboards! From compositive visualizations like gene and transcript annotations to interactive visualizations like multi-track apps and circular encoding of genes.
Drug Interactions Exploration Tool
The Drug Interactions Exploration Tool in Shiny is a valuable web application that utilizes an extensive online database to identify potential adverse effects related to drug combinations. This Shiny app serves as a valuable resource for healthcare professionals, researchers, and patients seeking to understand the risks associated with different drug interactions.
DrawCell - Cell Illustrations Simplified
The DrawCell Shiny Application, powered by the drawCell package, offers a user-friendly and engaging solution for life sciences educators, students, and researchers. Whether you need interactive cell diagrams for teaching or to streamline data visualization, DrawCell has you covered. Created by lead developer Álvaro Sánchez, this versatile tool has the potential to make a significant impact in biology education, enabling accessible research and knowledge sharing.
2022 Shiny Dashboard Examples in Life Sciences
RStudio: Covid-19 Tracker
It’s near impossible to list the best dashboards made with R Shiny in life sciences without mentioning Covid-19. The dashboard made by RStudio shows daily updates on the number of cases and deaths among 199 countries.
RStudio: Genome Browser
This dashboard shows a visualization based on Circos, which is a way of visualizing whole genomes. It uses pancreatic adenocarcinoma tumor samples data from various donors, provided by ICGN.
RStudio: ShinyMRI
The ShinyMRI dashboard visualizes 3D MRI images and is made entirely with R Shiny. It was also recognized as an honorable mention in the 2019 Shiny Contest.
.nii
or .nii.gz
format. That functionality makes the dashboard extremely useful for medical professionals. Sure, it’s in a PoC state now, but a little tweaking and added functionality could take it a long way.
Learn more:
Appsilon: Bee Colonies
The Bee Colonies dashboard was made by R/Shiny Developer, Ryszard Szymański, in one day. You’re reading that right - you can build Shiny dashboards that fast.
FielDHub: Designing Experiments in R Shiny
The FielDHub dashboard by North Dakota State University helps in the creation of traditional, un-replicated, augmented, and partially-replicated designs applied to agriculture, plant breeding, forestry, animal, and biological sciences.
CSBB: Computational Suite for Bioinformaticians and Biologists
The CSBB is an R Shiny dashboard developed with an intention to empower researchers from wet and dry labs to perform downstream Bioinformatics analysis.
runGitHub()
function from R Shiny, and it will take care of the dependency installation for you.
The dashboard comes with 8 modules (visualization, normalization, basics statistics, differential expression, correlation profiles, function enrichment, ChiP-ATAC seq, and single-cell RNA-seq analysis) that are designed in order to help researchers design a hypothesis or answer research questions with little or no expertise in bioinformatics.
Learn more:
GraphBio: Visualization Analysis for Omics Data
The GraphBio dashboard provides 15 popular visualization analysis methods (heatmap, volcano plot, MA plot, network plot, PCA, ROC analysis, and others).
Conclusion
Today you’ve seen seven examples of dashboards built with R Shiny in life sciences, and we’ve only scratched the surface. There are many other closed dashboards that aren’t accessible to the public. Shiny is used across many subfields of Life Sciences with applications in biodiversity monitoring to biotechnology research and patient care.Unsure about adopting R Shiny in your business? Here's what we've learned by helping Fortune 500s develop enterprise Shiny apps.The take-home point we want you to remember is the following: If your field of study can benefit from data science, it can also benefit from interactive dashboards. Look no further than R shiny, as it comes with everything you need to either automate or simplify your day job.
Looking to start a career as an R Shiny Developer? Our complete beginner guide has you covered.If you’re looking to build your first R Shiny dashboard, you can use Appsilon Shiny Dashboard Templates to simplify the process. The bundle contains a ton of beautiful and easy-to-use templates. The best part - is it’s entirely free. In case you need something more advanced, we’re also here to help. Appsilon is an RStudio Full Service Certified Partner. We develop advanced R Shiny applications for Fortune 500 companies across the globe. We’d be happy to help you choose the right options for your use case. Let's talk and see how Shiny can help you grow.
Would you like to learn the pros and cons of SAS and R in the life sciences? Check out our blog post and downloadable resource that covers what you need to know.