Anatomy and Art

So hey, guess who just finished grad school…

Yeah, that’s right I did!

Well, I guess that makes it official.

I am printing copies of the paper right now (sorry trees), and as soon as this is done I’ll see about printing slides from my presentation, and then making some good note cards for everything that I want to say. Wish me luck!

I realize that I haven’t been writing as much here lately.  That’s mostly because I’ve been spending so much time working out the details of my my final paper for the upcoming defense of my masters degree.  It’s looking like I am going to present just next week, and it is overwhelming how much there is to get in order.  I’d like to post the whole paper here at some point, though I suppose I should look in to whether or not I’m going to submit it anywhere else before I go putting it up online.  Here is the abstract though, for those of you interested in what I’m up to these days…

ABSTRACT

There is a need for education materials for patients undergoing orthognathic surgery.  The problem of conveying intricate accurate anatomical information to patients presents a design challenge for creators of such educational materials. The goal of this project was to explore possibilities for using new advancements in 3D animation technology to improve understanding on the part of patients prior to surgery. Computed tomography (CT) scanning, surgical observation, 3D animation, editing software, and DVD authoring technologies were utilized in the creation of a 3D animation for patients preparing to under-go the bilateral sagittal split osteotomy of the mandible and osseous genioplasty surgical procedures.

Sitting at a current 29-32 pages (depending on whether or not you count the script that I’m including but haven’t placed yet), I believe this is by far the longest paper I’ve ever written.  And that’s all I’m gonna say about that for now, as I need to get back to all that academic sayin’ that’s got to get done already!

Ooooh, so here’s a really fun artist find. Chek out the work of Heidi Taillefer!

I must say I’m impressed.  What a fun combination of the anatomical and the mechanical all mixed together in these positively romantic sort of settings.  Neat!

So, I was going to wait until I’d shown this in my big presentation next month, but I just couldn’t.  I put it up tonight.

Introducing, The Bilateral Sagittal Split Osteotomy and Osseous Genioplasty…

And if that doesn’t work, here’s a direct link to the YouTube page itself – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQI8L5Sxa6w

In other official news, I am officially a member of the International Association of Anaplasatology.

http://www.anaplastology.org/

This site is a great resource for finding an anaplastologist, or just learning more about the field.  And as a member, I’ll have access to journal articles and any job listings that may come up.  I should have done this months ago.

Well, it’s official.  I just submitted the new animation to the AMI for consideration at this summer’s conference.  I still haven’t uploaded it for public viewing yet, but that will come soon.  I had to trim a bit to get the piece within the AMI’s three minute time limit.  I’ll have to decide if I really like those changes or if I want to put any of that back for myself when I am not submitting under that set of rules.  That’s not a decision I have to make tonight though.

Rather, I just spent the last several hours getting all my graphics together for submission alongside the animation itself.  That was my little thumbnail image at the beginning of the post up there.  And then I have the web display image.

And lastly, one that’s more of a poster for the whole thing.

It won’t be long before I’m in Baltimore, meeting up with so many medical illustrators, and all of this will be a finished project.  I’ll even have presented for my graduation by then.  It’s all wrapping up here.

Anyway, I’ll publish the animation itself soon.  In the meantime, phew!

Medical Art Prosthetics is in the news this week!  That’s where I was just doing my anaplastology internship in Dallas, not even two months ago.  Looks like their work with the CPAP masks has been catching some attention here.  You can read all about it, or even watch the KDAF-TV news report here.

http://www.the33tv.com/news/kdaf-custom-fit-cpap-story,0,2709005.story

I’m a little light on time to write these days, but I wanted to share this link to a great article that talks about finding the golden ratio in music.

http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen%20Break%20and%20GR.html

So I was working a little with Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro today to come up with a good looking DVD screen menu for the upcoming animation.  I’m not sure that I’m quite sold on it yet, but I don’t think it’s bad either.

The red is what the button will look like selected or clicked.  The white is what it will look like unclicked.  I don’t actually have a Spanish language version yet, but I do have an initial translation from having run all of my narration dialogue through Yahoo’s Babblefish translator online.  Unfortunately, my Spanish is so poor that I can’t tell if it’s making sense or not.  But if I can just get a few fluent Spanish speakers to look it over for me, I could at least solidify the script, and then it’s a matter of recording that new track, and laying that audio in under the animation for a 2nd version.  I would probably want to tweak the animation a little for that version just to make certain movements time to the appropriate words as they do in English, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of what I can do.  If I have to narrate it myself in Spanish it might not be the prettiest, but I still think even then it would still be worth making.  I suppose if nothing else, I could at least offer Spanish subtitles, and then no one would have to hear my American accent, but especially having read so much about the power of sight and sound combined in education, I’d hate to have people reading the text while they are watching the images and not hearing the words.  I guess I’ll just have to see what winds up being possible as it comes.