Miriam Stuke (1), Christian Tönsing (1), Henning Schmidt (1)
(1) IntiQuan AG, Basel, Switzerland
Introduction/Objectives:
Introducing the software solution IQReport, a software developed by IntiQuan, which aims to improve pharmacometric reporting. It enables the generation of comprehensive, customizable, and reproducible reports and offers functionality to automize report generation. Commonly used script-based solutions in academia such as Markdown, LaTeX, or knitr lack in sufficient support for translation to Microsoft Word, cross-referencing, or have complex setup requirements, making them unsuitable for an integrated approach. IQReport, on the other hand, combines the strengths of available open-source software, enabling the generation of reproducible Word reports with extensive Word functionality and support direct integration of various inputs of pharmacometrics analyses.
Our work aims to demonstrate the utility of IQReport in streamlining the reporting process of pharmacometric analyses, improving reproducibility, and facilitating the generation of high-quality reports in Microsoft Word format. We showcase how results from pharmacometrics analyses can be seamlessly integrated into such reports using the IQReport markup language. We highlight additional features that improve efficiency during report writing, specifically the convenient cross-referencing for tables, figures, and sections, as well as automatic generation of table of contents, and list of figures and tables. IQReport further ensures traceability by automatic annotation of inputs from log file information. It further supports script-based creation of review comments and color highlight, thereby facilitating the tracked editing of the report as Word document.
Methods:
IQReport allows to construct a report, including text sections, structural elements and all required inputs in a text document written in the IQReport markup language, which uses an extended Markdown syntax that supports custom formatting and mathematical formulas. The Markdown document can be edited using any commonly used text editor. As input, IQReport supports figures in various formats such as PDF, jpg, gif, png, etc.. Tables to be included in the resulting Word document need to be stored as a text file in a HTML and Markdown inspired syntax, which can be generated automatically, for example from data.frames in R, using the IQReport API R package. Standard markdown syntax can be used in addition to include inline tables. The specific settings for the Word document are defined by a Word style template, making the report amenable to a company’s corporate design.
IQReport uses readily-available open source 3rd party software, that is for example pre-installed on any Ubuntu installation. Pandoc[1] is used for the basic conversion into a Word document. PDF inputs are handled using Ghostscript[2], allowing the conversion to png or extraction of specific pages. ImageMagick[3] is utilized to crop white space around figures when desired.
Results:
IntiQuan’s software solution IQReport addresses the challenges faced in the pharmacometrics workflow by seamlessly integrating analysis outputs into comprehensive reports. It offers a range of features including customizable Word documents, figure and table titles, commenting, highlighting, automated referencing, that allows a script-based reporting in a user friendly syntax. By easily integrating into popular coding environments and ensuring precise figure placement and painless report updates, this solution enhances workflow efficiency, traceability, reproducibility, and report organization even for complex pharmacometrics analyses. And it certainly is not limited to use in Pharmacometrics only.
Conclusions:
We demonstrate the software’s capacity to handle complex analyses, producing a comprehensive, reproducible report that adheres to current best practices in pharmacometric reporting. We showcase how users can significantly enhance workflow efficiency, ensure traceability as well as reproducibility, and improve the organization of reports in their data-driven analyses using IQReport.
References:
[1] https://pandoc.org/
[2] https://www.ghostscript.com/
[3] https://www.imagemagick.org/
Reference: PAGE 32 (2024) Abstr 11011 [www.page-meeting.org/?abstract=11011]
Poster: Software Demonstration