Eye-opening maps reveal how and where Americans die

National mortality rates are helpful if you want to learn about the US as a whole, but they don't say much about the slew of ways people in particular locations died - the heart disease cases in Michigan, the HIV/AIDS in Florida, and the lung cancer in Kentucky.

To see those patterns, you need more granular data points.

The Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation has that information. Relying on 2014 government data, IHME offers an online tool that can sort mortality by cause of death, age, sex, location, or any combination of the four, all based on the number of deaths per 100,000 people. It reveals startling maps of where public-health funds may be needed most.

Here's a sampling of the trends IHME data illuminates.