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 grows into a complex network of arteries and veins and as it becomes infected with disease. TheVisualMD.com site will expand in 2009 to include anatomical visualizations of disease states such as asthma, depression, chronic kidney disease, anemia, arthritis, osteoporosis, colon cancer and oral care, allowing professionals to access content 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. Tsiaras will be one of some two dozen storytellers who take the stage at this year's Summit. 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.
"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' 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.
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