Many informative maps are available to follow the spread of COVID-19. This is important information but only part of the story. The global scientific and medical communities have immediately responded to the outbreak with focused research activities. This has led to clinical trials and scientific publications worldwide. The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) at Heidelberg University developed together with Markus Ries from the Center for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, University Hospital Heidelberg a Map of COVID-19 Clinical Trials.
Fig: Map of Clinical Trials related to Covid-19 available at: https://covid-19.heigit.org/
Take a look at the “Map of Hope” and get a geographical overview on planned, ongoing and finished clinical trials related to COVID-19. The map shows the location of clinical trials differentiated by study type. The time slider allows to analyze when studies were registered at the different (national) registries. The location of the studies is accurate to the city level.
The information on clinical trials is based on data from the WHO Clinical Trials Search Portal about COVID-19 related clinical trials. The Clinical Trials Search Portal provides access to a central database containing the trial registration data sets provided by important international registries. The WHO portal gets updated every Friday by six important registries and every 4 weeks by additional registries. We aim at updating our maps without too much delay.
Medical know-how comes from Markus Ries, data pre-processing and the service deployment is performed by the HeiGIT team members. Geocoding was done using the openrouteservice API. This is a free to use service by HeiGIT for many geographical applications such as geocoding, routing and accessibility analysis. Please contact us if you are interested in using it for your research, especially if it is related to health and disaster management.
This is a first draft prototype and work in progress, we are looking forward to your comments and ideas. Any assistance welcome. Stay tuned and check again for updates soon.