Wednesday, 28 November 2018

Working with the ICIJ Medical Devices dataset in Neo4j

Just last weekend our friends at the ICIJ published another really interesting case of investigative journalism - tracking down and publishing the quite absurd and disturbing practices of the medical devices industry. The entire case with all of the developing stories can be found at https://medicaldevices.icij.org/ - take a look as it really is quite fascinating. Of course that meant that I wanted to see what that data looked like in Neo4j, and if I could have a play. I didn't have time for a full detailed exploration yet - but hopefully this will also give others the opportunity to chime in. So let's see.

The Medical Devices dataset as a graph

This turned out to be surprisingly easy. Just download the Zip file from the ICIJ website: https://medicaldevices.icij.org/download/icij-imddb-2018-11-25.zip, unzip this, and then we get 3 comma-separated-values files:
  • one for the Devices that are being reported on
  • one for the Events that are being reported (whenever something happens to a device (eg. a recall) then that is logged and reported)
  • one for the Manufacturers of the medical devices.
That's easy enough.