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User’s Guide for the Alternatives Assessment Dashboard (AA Dashboard)
Citation:
Vegosen, L. AND T. Martin. User’s Guide for the Alternatives Assessment Dashboard (AA Dashboard). U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-19/145, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
The beta version of the AA Dashboard allows users to quickly evaluate the hazard posed by a chemical in nineteen different categories. The underlying data and web interfaces of the AA Dashboard will be utilized in the RapidTox effort. The hazard profile rates the hazard potential of a chemical using scores from low to very high for a variety of categories including acute mammalian toxicity, carcinogenicity, and aquatic toxicity. The scores are derived from a number of sources including chemical lists, GHS classifications, experimental data, and predictions from toxicity models such as those in WebTEST. The tool is tentatively implemented within the batch mode of WebTEST.
Description:
The goal of alternatives assessment is to identify safer alternatives for chemicals of concern. The Alternatives Assessment Dashboard (AA Dashboard) is a webtool that is being developed to enable users to readily compare the hazard profiles of chemical alternatives. Chemical hazard data was obtained from public online sources including chemical hazard lists, Globally Harmonized System (GHS) scores, quantitative experimental toxicity values, and predicted values using quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models. The AA Dashboard can batch predict toxicity values in real time using QSAR models from Web-services Toxicity Estimation Software Tool (WebTEST). The beta version of the AA Dashboard currently contains over 290,000 score records for more than 85,000 chemicals. The AA Dashboard allows users to a select a list of chemicals and compare them in terms of several human health, ecotoxicity, and fate endpoints. For example, endpoints such as acute mammalian toxicity, carcinogenicity, and mutagenicity are used to characterize human health hazards. Color-coded hazard scores (very high = pink, high = orange, medium = yellow, low = green, and not assigned = gray) were determined for each endpoint. The scoring criteria were based on the EPA’s Design for the Environment Program (DfE) Alternatives Assessment Criteria for Hazard Evaluation. Information from multiple sources was used to determine hazard scores by using a modified version of GreenScreen List Translator’s trumping method in which the score is assigned as the most toxic value from the most authoritative source.