1 Introduction

The nmaplateplot package is a graphical display of results from network meta-analysis (NMA). It is suitable for outcomes like odds ratio (OR), risk ratio (RR), risk difference (RD) and standardized mean difference (SMD). It also has an option to visually display and compare the surface under the cumulative ranking (SUCRA) of different treatments. Moreover, nmaplateplot is good at details, including choosing colors, text size, circle size, layout and adding title.

1.1 Quick example: Efficacy and acceptability of 12 Antidepressants

We use a dataset to quickly demonstrate the plate plot.

The ad12.eff.acc dataset contains the point estimates (posterior medians), interval estimates (95% credible intervals), p-values of odds ratios (ORs) for both efficacy and acceptability of 12 antidepressants based on arm-based network meta-analysis.

library(nmaplateplot)
library(svglite)
data("ad12.eff.acc")
plateplot(ad12.eff.acc, design_method = c("circle", "circle"),
             upper_diagonal_name = "Efficacy", lower_diagonal_name = "Acceptability")

Let us explain the components of the plate plot:

The upper diagonal part graphically presents ORs for efficacy, while the lower diagonal part graphically presents ORs for acceptability.

Each cell in off-diagonal part contains 2 (for p > 0.05) or 3 (for p < 0.05) concentric circles with white circle (inner circle) representing lower bound of interval estimates if result is significant, grey circle (middle circle) representing point estimates, and outer circle with varying colors representing upper bound of interval estimates. The varying colors are associated with p-values shown in the color bar. The circles’ size is positively associated with (point/interval) estimates.

For example: 1) the plate with (blue/grey/white) color in the 1st row and 12th column cell means MIR is significantly more effective than REB in terms of response rate (efficacy); 2) the plate with (red/grey) color in the 2nd row and 1st column cell means MIR is less acceptable (higher dropout rate) than ESC, though this effect is not statistically significant.

The diagonal texts are names of 12 antidepressant drugs with 2 numbers in each cell standing for SUCRA(%) for efficacy and acceptability of these treatments. The background colors in diagonal part are associated with SUCRA values as shown in the color bar.

In addition to the plate plot which graphically and intuitively displays the NMA results, the package can directly print the point estimates with 95% credible intervals.

# option design_method controls whether you want upper and lower diagonal parts to display "text" or "circle" respectively.
plateplot(ad12.eff.acc, design_method = c("text", "text"),
             upper_diagonal_name = "Efficacy", lower_diagonal_name = "Acceptability")