“Osman Ratib, professor and chief of nuclear medicine at the University Hospital of Geneva, has co-created a computer software program called Osirix. It enables medical professionals to view medical images on their iPods, saving them and the hospitals they work for thousands of dollars in expensive equipment.

“Medical imaging these days is much more than just looking at slices through the body — it’s about looking at the body in motion, in function. We’re dealing with images that are more than just 2D, black and white images.

“It’s not rocket science but it’s taking something that’s been designed for the consumer market and using it for something that’s medically driven.”

“Skulls do more than just protect the brain — they also stimulate the mind. Often symbols of mortality and power, they have been employed in human ceremony, ritual, and art for tens of thousands of years. From the ancient animal skulls in Paleolithic burial sites to the curlicued cattle skulls that float like spirits over Georgia O’Keefe’s canvas mountains, cultures around the world have turned to skulls to express ideas about both life and death.“

“… looks at how artists in many different cultures and times have portrayed our health and the people who keep us in good health – the healing professions.

Drawing on the wide range of books from around the world in the British Library, the exhibition includes both serious and humorous pictures of diagnosis and treatment, prevention and cure, and doctors and nurses themselves.“

“The Image Bank contains hundreds of images of fungi that range from images of microscopic fungi in tissue to macroscopic images of people, animals, and plants that have fungal infections. Many of the images are also available as pre-packaged PowerPoint slides.“

The image bank seems fairly extensive and each image is annotated. The PowerPoint slides are more than just an image slapped into a blank presentation. Each slide conveniently contains the same annotations that are in the image bank and is pre-formatted. The formatting is simple and unobtrusive and should be pretty easy to tweak if you would like it to more closely resemble the rest of your presentation. The only thing I didn’t like is that each slide seems to have the The Dr. Fungus URL in large purple letters running up the left side. This can easily be deleted.

“Do you know of any remarkable health education materials that make a significant impact on the way health-related information is communicated?

The Vesalius Trust for Visual Communication in the Health Sciences is accepting applications for the 2004 Frank Netter Award for Special Contributions to Medical Education. This award is given annually to an individual, institution or company in recognition of the development of visually oriented educational materials that have made a significant contribution to the advancement of education and research in visual communication for the health sciences. There is no application fee. The award includes a plaque, monetary award of $1,000 and travel expenses to receive the award at the annual meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators. Past winners have made innovative contributions in healthcare education including anatomical models, books, simulators, videotapes, and interactive learning materials.

Anyone interested in applying for this prestigious award can get an application and additional information on the Vesalius Trust Web site.

Application deadline for the 2004 award is December 12, 2003.“

Thanks to Karen Adsit, Walker Teaching Resource Center, Univ. of Tenn. at Chattanooga

This came up again recently and the discussion ended with the usual unsatisfactory conclusions (tradition and the American preference for more personal space). I’ve tried finding an answer online and although there are many, many sites devoted to creating good posters, none of them dealt with this question.

Personally, I prefer working with the horizontal format because it seems to lend itself to creating a good poster; the flow of the content is just more fluid and there are more options available for making it all fit together.

If you have any insight into this apparent cultural divide in the conference world, I’d appreciate it if you would drop me a line or share it in a comment attached to this entry. Thanks.

“This beautifully illustrated folio volume consists of forty four coloured lithograph plates with accompanying descriptions of various pathological conditions. The text and the drawings were undertaken by Sir Robert Carswell, who was both a distinguished practitioner of pathology and a skilled artist. Perhaps overshadowed by more well known anatomical atlases, this is a monumental work that deserves further study.“

Carswell’s motivation for creating this landmark work echoes a one of the central theme’s of TEHI: the importance of being visual. He “undertook its publication because of ‘the great difficulty, and frequently the impossibility, of comprehending even the best descriptions of the physical or anatomical characters of diseases, without the aid of coloured delineations.’“

From the artist’s statement:

“My mixed media work explores perceptions of beauty and horror, comfort and discomfort. I use science and medicine a point of departure to explore our ambivalence towards the human body and its functions. I often combine anatomical and scientific imagery with domestic objects and materials. This juxtaposition creates a response that fluctuates between seduction and repulsion, comfort and alienation. This dichotomous experience is evoked by enticing and playful imagery that upon closer inspection reveals some uncomfortable truth about our cultural and biological conditions.“

I was also fascinated by all of the different schemes, both graphical and mechanical, designed to make sure the pills are taken correctly. In most cases, all the pills in a prescription are identical and anonymous. Each pill does the same job as all the others. Each pill in a course of contraceptives, on the other hand, has its own meaning and identity.

The PBS series American Experience did an episode about the Pill. As far as I could tell from a quick reading of the transcript (I didn’t get to see the broadcast), it doesn’t touch on any of these issues. However, there is an image gallery on the website devoted to the episode and it contains a fair amount of material about various designs of the Pill’s packaging. For instance, before the first version of the Pill (Enovid) was used as a contraceptive, it was used to treat menstrual irregularities and was delivered in a simple, small brown bottle.

“This animation demonstrates a framework for retrieving and visualizing biologically and psychologically relevant information from biological motion patterns. It is based on walking data from 40 male and 40 female walkers. Using a motion capture system their movement were recorded while walking on a treadmill.

The data were subsequently transformed into a representation which allows for linear morphing. The resulting “walking space” was then transformed using principal component analysis. A space spanned by the first 10 eigenwalkers was used to compute linear disciminant functions for the respective attributes.

Sex and weight of each walker were directly available from our records. The other two attributes were derived from psychophysical experiments. A number of observers were presented with point-light displays of the 80 walkers. For each of them they had to rate the attributes nervous/relaxed and happy/sad on a scale of 7 steps.

Parts of the procedure are described in:Troje, N. F. (2002) Decomposing biological motion: A framework for the analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns. Journal of Vision 2:371-387.“

[via nastystart]