Anatomy Education Applications (and Illustrations)

Anatomy illustrations are widely used in medical education and as far as I know Radiologists use them to identify diseases. Looking at medical illustrations and education practices is interesting for this project. In medical illustrations people thought about how they illustrate the human body to show specific important things they want to tell you about. In my opinion a goal of the development of medical scans is to reach the quality of medical illustrations (generated by a computer). This would probably make the work of Radiologists much easier. There is a ton of information about medical illustrations out there…  So I close the research on this topic for now.

A thought that came to my mind while looking at all the fascinating illustrations: What if medical scans would have such a high resolution that they could display individual cells or even atoms?

Medi-Mation – Medical & Scientific Visualization

Following you’ll find 3 interactive educational tools for human anatomy. They show interesting ways how to visualize the human body and also some nice interface ideas how to view it.

Visualizing Time and Movement

Body-changes over time (like muscle movement, blood flow, brain activity) could be interesting for Radiologists to see. Todays medical scanners are able to track these changes and produce high resolution 4D images. But what is an appropriate way to view and analyse this data. A 3D model in which you can modify the timeline and the viewing direction is the most simpel way to view these images. But are there other smarter solutions and how do we combine images from different scan sessions, scans that are maybe days, weeks or years apart. With upcoming electronic and linked patient records this could be possible. (I need to check if this is needed at all.)

Recreating Movement
is a diploma thesis by Martin Hilpoltsteiner at the University of Applied Sciences Wuerzburg, Germany, Communication Arts. It has some very unique ways of analyzing movement in videos. The basic idea is to extract all single frames of a movie and arrange these in different ways to make it easier to analyze movements. It also uses coloring and tracking filters to emphasize special features of the movement. In his work Martin gave some examples of analyzing sports movements, and car crash tests. I think it could also be applied to analyze medical video or 4D data.

Sports movement – Here you can see the movement of a baseball player. The background is removed so you can only see the player. In the example videos you can also see comparison of two different movements or the same movement with different filters.

Visualization of medical Scans

Today I tried to get some more information on Medical Data Visualization. There is a lot of very interesting looking visualizations out there. But as I discussed with my mentor Mine, it’s always nice to have nice looking visualizations especially for us designers, but the more important questions should be if it is helpful in any way for the Radiologists to read the data.

Researching for this post reminded me of the Bodies Exhibition I visited a while ago. I am not sure if the Bodies Exhibition can be titled as art, but I think it could be very inspiring for this project, because its displaying human bodies and its parts in a lot of different and interesting ways. Slicing the human body and extracting special organs is exactly what I found in Radiology.

1. picture shows a full human body but only the blood vessels.
2. sliced up human body
3. human skull with arteries and veins in different colors

Following you’ll find a collection of different ways to visualize medical scans: