VisualSHIELD - A suite of tools for non-disclosive analysis of biomedical data on federated databases that aggregates and extends the functionalities of the popular DataSHIELD R package

VisualSHIELD is an open-source, extensible web interface that simultaneously provides a standardized deployment of the DataSHIELD infrastructure and a graphical user interface to dsSwissKnife and other R packages in order to simplify the definition of an analysis workflow and the visualization of the results. It was implemented as a Shiny module, a graphical R package that can be embedded into any user-defined Shiny app to provide the federated analysis capability. It was designed with an open-source architecture that makes it extensible and provides a clear framework for the addition of user-defined federated analyses. The tool provides a simple graphical user interface that integrates DataSHIELD analysis methods such as histograms contour plots heatmaps boxplots correlation matrix