NMAstudio web-application: A brief tutorial

For a given medical condition, network meta-analysis (NMA) compares multiple available treatments in a network of comparative studies and provides both direct and indirect estimates of the relative effects for all treatments at hand. Despite NMA is increasingly used to inform decision-making, the lack of user-friendly software is still limiting its usage within a restricted community of researchers and end-users. In this tutorial, we describe NMAstudio, a novel user-friendly tool aimed to produce and visualise network meta-analyses in a fully interactive way. NMAstudio enhances visualisation while simplifying the reporting and interpretation of findings. The main feature of the application is a direct visual connection between a customisable network diagram and the main NMA outputs. Specifically, users upload their data and interact with the network diagram by clicking one or more nodes-treatments or edges-comparisons; based on the selection made, tailored outputs and information are displayed. NMAstudio is written in Python and connected to the R package netmeta to produce the NMA estimates.