Heat map

Heat maps are visual representations of data in matrices with colors. Two dimensions of the data are captured by the location of a point (i.e., a map) and a third dimension is represented by the color of the point (i.e., the value).

Some nuclear medicine studies are technically examples of heat maps with standardized color palettes in the DICOM file format.

Heat maps have been utilized in data analysis for over a century , and have more recently played a critical role in radiology research. For example, in radiomics and others quantitative biology fields (-omics), large tables of data are sorted or clustered and then color coded to help researchers visually identify patterns . For another example, to aid understanding of AI model predictions, the model may produce a heat map that identifies the areas of the input image that contributed most to the model's classification using a technique called class activation mappings .