"Can you map injuries to a human body inside Power BI?"
That was the question. Instead of settling for a workaround, I built it from scratch — a fully interactive body map where clicking any region filters every visual on the page, hovering reveals injury details, and colour intensity shows which areas are most affected.
Why I Built This
Safety teams and healthcare analysts deal with injury data every day. But when it comes to reporting, they're stuck with tables and bar charts that don't answer the most natural question: where on the body are injuries actually happening?
Existing options in Power BI don't solve this well. Static images with overlays can't filter or interact with anything. The Synoptic Panel has flexibility and scaling limitations. Custom .pbiviz visuals require separate development and ongoing maintenance.
None of these give you what you actually need — a visual that works like any other Power BI element. Click, filter, drill through. No extra tools, no extra licences.
What Makes This Different
This visual is built with Deneb (Vega) and custom SVG mapping. It sits inside your Power BI report like any native visual. No Synoptic Panel, no custom .pbiviz files, no external dependencies. It just works.
The Approach
The solution uses Deneb (Vega) — a certified custom visual in Power BI — combined with hand-traced SVG paths for each body region. Every region is individually mapped and dynamically linked to the dataset so it responds to selections, slicers, and cross-filtering in real time.
The colour scale responds to injury frequency — regions with more incidents show warmer colours, giving you an instant visual read on where the problems are concentrated. Hover over any region for detailed metrics. Click to filter the entire page.
Where the Real Complexity Is
The concept is straightforward. The execution is not.
Each body region needs to be individually traced as an SVG path — precise coordinates, clean boundaries, no overlaps. With 22+ regions across front and back views, that's significant manual work before the visual even touches the data model.
Then there's the Deneb specification itself — binding each path to the right data category, setting up the colour scales, configuring the tooltip behaviour, and making sure cross-filtering works cleanly with every other visual on the page.
Getting a version that looks right takes effort. Getting a version that works reliably in a production report — with real data, real users, and real performance requirements — takes experience.
The Hardest Part
It's not the Power BI side. It's the SVG path tracing and the precision required to make every region align correctly with data categories. One misaligned path and the interaction breaks. This is where most of the build time goes.
Where This Is Valuable
This type of visual turns raw injury data into something decision-makers can immediately act on. Instead of scanning a table of body part names and counts, they see exactly where incidents are concentrated — and they can click to drill into the details.
Workplace Safety
Track injury patterns across body regions to identify recurring hazards and target safety interventions.
Healthcare Analytics
Map patient injury or symptom data to body regions for clinical reporting and trend analysis.
Insurance Claims
Visualise claim distributions by body part to spot patterns and assess risk across portfolios.
Incident Reporting
Give operations teams instant visibility into where incidents are concentrated across the workforce.
Final Thoughts
This project shows what Power BI can do when you push past default visuals. The tools are there — Deneb is a certified visual, SVG is an open standard. The difference is in the execution.
If your organisation tracks injury or incident data and you want your team to see it mapped directly to the human body — inside the same Power BI reports they already use — this is how it's done.
Want This in Your Dashboard?
If you need an interactive body map built into your Power BI report — send me a message. I'll tailor it to your data.
Send Me a Message →