TheVisualMD.Com Offers Free, Global Access to Animated 3-D views of Human Body in Action
People around the world will soon have access to a powerful new type of medical information—a 3-D visual exploration of the cardiovascular system created from the seamless integration of state-of-the-art medical imaging and computer-generate animations. TheVisualMD.com, the latest effort from Alexander Tsiaras' Anatomical Travelogue, will allow users to view the heart as it develops and grows into a complex network of arteries and veins and as it becomes infected with disease. Viewers will also be able to visualize and explore the heart’s “duties” as one of the human body’s most important organs.
TheVisualMD.com site will expand in February 2009 to include animated anatomical visualizations of additional disease states such as asthma, depression, chronic kidney disease, anemia, arthritis, osteoporosis, colon cancer and oral care. Each week TheVisualMD.com will launch a new therapeutic area, allowing professionals access to content to optimize for patient education and patients to engage in a rich visual experience that will lead to greater understanding and compliance.
Tsiaras will unveil TheVisualMD at the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF-4 Summit on October 15-16 in Providence, Rhode Island. Now in its fourth year, the BIF Summit brings together leading innovators to share stories about their work. Tsiaras will be one of some two dozen storytellers who take the stage at this year’s Summit.
Designed for everyday people, TheVisualMD.com will provide a sophisticated and medically accurate view of the cardiovascular system but does so in a way that non-scientists can understand and appreciate.
A pioneer in illustrating the intricate details of the human body in images that are at once high-tech, anatomically faithful and artistically striking—Tsiaras is a author, technologist and visionary with an expert knowledge of anatomy and a passion for the human form. The images used in TheVisualMD are visualizations that Tsiaras and his team create using full-body scans, ultra-powerful microscopes and molecular modeling tools that allow him to illustrate the body in vivid detail, for both 3-D pictures and animations. He has described his work as "Pixar meet the NIH."
For the past 19 years, Tsiaras and his team have been amassing a stunning library of visualizations using full-body scans, ultra-powerful microscopes and molecular modeling tools that allow him to visualize—using proprietary programs he developed—the body in vivid detail.
System by system, the company has constructed comprehensive, three-dimensional images and animations of both male and female forms which include everything from muscles and skeleton, to the mechanics of digestion, the circadian rhythms of the heart, and the intricacy of the brain and nerve network.
Creating TheVisualMD.com was a natural next step, says Tsiaras to making the team’s work more accessible to lay people. "There is a great educational need in this county for public health information. Many Americans have no idea why their bodies are failing them or what they can do to make a positive change in their health."
And while he always believed the future of his library was limitless, until recently, he hadn't quite figured out a way to harness it. Enter TheVisualMD.com—a robust visual media platform for health information. "With TheVisualMD.com, we've built a new interactive content delivery system for anyone, anywhere in the world," he explains. Most importantly, the site will be free to all users.
"Everyone always assumes that when you present scientific information you need to tell a dumb-downed story to the consumer," says Tsiaras. "But when you see a clear picture of something – for instance a high-end visualization of the destruction of neurons - it's pretty obvious what's going on and can be understood by pretty much anyone."
Tsiaras' aspiration for TheVisualMD.com is huge: "Eighteen to twenty-four months from now, I think we'll be the standard for everyone who wants to understand disease states. The goal is to own health on the Internet."
"One of the things about coming up with new ideas is sticking with them and outlasting the doubters so to speak," he says. With nearly a generation of proprietary data to draw from, TheVisualMD.com has plenty of staying power.
Tsiaras’ launch at BIF-4 is not his first time at the BIF Summit. You can watch a video of his presentation at BIF-2 here.
Tsiaras, 54, is largely self-educated, recounting proudly that he was tossed out of seven colleges. The son of Greek immigrants, he returned to Greece at age 19 and spent one year herding goats in the country's mountainous north. With artistic training as a painter and sculptor, he took photographs on his trip that he later turned into his first book, on Greek funerary customs.
Back in the States, Tsiaras visited an older brother, renowned ophthalmologist Dr. William Tsiaras, and was struck by what he considered the inherent drama of the X-ray images in his lab. He began photographing and writing about his brother's eye surgery, which led him into a career as an award-winning science photojournalist—at the same time as he was training for a possible berth on Greece's Olympic track and field team.
In the late 1980s, when Tsiaras got his first glimpse of scans from CT and MRI machines—the ultimate cameras—he had found his life's calling. Teaching himself several programming languages, he set about creating software that would allow him to "paint" the human body using data-rich digital images.
His work lends itself not just to books and television programming; Nike hired Anatomical Travelogue to produce animated spots revealing the anatomy of a golfer's swing, and drug companies like Amgen and Pfizer are using the company's simulations to show how new drugs work at the molecular level.
"Along the way, we became great storytellers in categories that everybody wants to know about," he says. "We're like Pixar Animated Studios for health and the human body, except we use real people and real data."
The 2008 BIF-4 Summit will be hosted by BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Bruce Nussbaum and Bill Taylor, bestselling author of “Mavericks at Work.” Past co-hosts have included Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg and author Richard Saul Wurman. Read more about Tsiaras and the BIF-4 summit at www.businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-4
More About Anatomical Travelogue, Inc.
Anatomical Travelogue is an award-winning producer of health-related television programming and high-end 3D animation based on actual human data. We use pioneering scanning technologies to create the medical images of our content. For the first time ever, we are able to take viewers on incredible journeys through the body. From the molecule on up to cells, tissues, organs and systems, our proprietary scientific visualizations deliver images that are unrivaled in accuracy and artistry. For more information on Anatomical Travelogue, please visit www.anatomicaltravel.com.
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