Puberty Plot

Description

Puberty Plot is an application accompanying the article of Van Buuren & Ooms (Statistics in Medicine, 2009). It plots stage-line diagrams: age-conditional reference diagrams for tracking development. The resulting SDS (Standard Deviation scores) are an indication of the development progress of a patient with respect to a reference population. In this example this conserns puberty development stages, so called Tanner stages. The application is used to diagnose growth problems for teenagers.

What it does

The website allows the user to fill in a series of observed Tanner stages (sexual development scores) with the corresponding ages for a patient. This data is then sent to a server that dynamically generates the stage plot, and instantly returns it to the client by means of an Ajax request. The server calls an R-script that calculates the SDS scores for the observed tanner values and draws the appropriate stage diagram. After the diagram has been shown to the user, reference lines can be added or removed, and the plot can easily be exported to high quality PDF format with a single click.

Try it now!

The application is publicly available at http://vps.stefvanbuuren.nl/puberty/