MedicinePPT Notes
Terry Irwin is a consultant surgeon in Belfast, Northern Ireland working for the National Health Service (NHS) at the Royal Victoria Hospital, the main regional centre in Northern Ireland. His surgical specialty is colon and rectal surgery - always a good conversation stopper when people ask him what he does. His response is that he repairs waste disposal systems! Terry is also a long time PowerPoint user and co-author of a book on PowerPoint geared towards the designing of medical presentations. In this conversation, Terry talks about the the usage of PowerPoint in the medicine industry, and his training sessions.
Geetesh: What are the specific areas of PowerPoint usage by the medical community including doctors that sets it apart from mainstream PowerPoint use?
Terry: PowerPoint is of course the main method of supporting communication at medical meetings, training sessions and in teaching students. It is pretty much universal. While in many ways it has much in common with presentation content in other arenas, there are some subtle and some more significant differences.
Most scientific presentations have to be balanced, there is no product to hype up or sell. Instead the arguments for and against have to be presented, ideally with a clear conclusion. A major concern in clinical presentations is confidentiality. Much of the material centres around patient data, but we have to respect patients' rights at the same time. That is not always easy.
Also, medicine is rich in digital data. Radiology and endoscopy systems can now save digitised output such as CT and MR scans, ECGs, colonoscopies and keyhole (laparoscopic) surgery. Many people don't realise that CT, ultrasound and MR images are 3D and can be reconstructed in some very clever ways. They can also be exported as videos. Showing full screen embedded video in a presentation is the holy grail of medical presentation at the minute and being able to overlay text and markers on top of the video without having to learn how to use video editing software, will revolutionise medical presentations.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the type of PowerPoint training you provide.
Terry: Medical staff and students are really good at speaking and really bad at content design! I guess this is no surprise, since they are used to speaking one to one with patients, and their hand-writing is terrible. Still, it drives me crazy that they cannot lay out slide content in a way that enhances their message, rather than distracting from it. I try to help with understanding basic concepts: legibility, color schemes, correct use of graphics, tables and artwork. I work hard at trying to eradicate those old PowerPoint annoyances of reading slides aloud, wordy slide content and irritating animation. In addition, my main focus is on content delivery. No surprises -- doctors are very clinical! They need to learn to tell a story, capture the attention of the audience and communicate their message. This comes easily to sales teams but it is counter-intuitive for medics.
A favorite, and one that always goes down well, is to take a presentation from one of the audience and do a make over on it. This has unearthed some fantastic lessons. Two good examples are the X-ray images photographed on a light box with a digital camera. The resulting color image can be an enormous file. Reducing this by resizing it, cropping out the edges and converting it to greyscale can reduce file size dramatically. A second classic was the beautiful pie chart that included a linked Excel spreadsheet containing three years of PhD research that had been left on a server at a meeting. So much for keeping your data safe from prying eyes!
I do a lot of one-to-one teaching with my own staff. After all, when they speak at meetings, they are representing me, so it had better be good. I also get invites to teach in some other departments in Queen's University in Belfast. On top of that I have been lucky enough to be asked to speak at meetings in places as far apart as Reykjavik, Prague, Athens and Beijing! A highlight was an invitation to spend a week teaching PowerPoint in Dubai. As I write this, I am about to travel to Cuba and Barbados with my other passion - I am the honorary secretary of the Travelling Surgical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We will be doing a teaching session on communication skills in Barbados as part of this meeting. This will include two talks on presentations.
So PowerPoint has been good to me, I have got to meet a lot of interesting people along the way, including my good friend and co-author Julie Terberg and of course Geetesh Bajaj!
Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint, training
Guy van der Walt is a 3D animator with over 8 years of experience, and the owner of Plasticboy Pictures, a company that offers a collection of medically accurate 3D models that can be downloaded from their website, and used in the creation of medical imagery.
In this conversation, Guy talks about imagery using the human anatomy, and how 3D models can help.
Geetesh: Medical art often involves human anatomy to be depicted – yet it is difficult to source imagery of this sort. How do your 3D anatomy models help people in this regard?
Guy: The creation of medical diagrams is a fairly vast field in that there is such a wide variety of applications and also countless scenarios to be depicted. For this reason one often finds it difficult to source the exact image that one desires to portray a specific message. Pre-existing image libraries are limited, while the artistic style variations are frequently outdated for the contemporary media of today. This is where the use of 3D models come to the rescue. One is able save massive amounts of time by downloading a trusted "virtual anatomy puppet" that can be manipulated in order to create an infinite number of medical diagrams. Our human anatomy 3D models thus serve as a foundation for the designing of unique medical diagrams. Artists can choose to render these as they see fit. For example, they might end up looking like an x-ray, a generic diagram, flat color artwork or even photo realism. Models can also be used to create animated sequences, something that the limits of traditional medical imagery does not cater for.
At plasticboy.co.uk we spend around 50% of our production time researching various medical resources in order to ensure we only construct medically accurate human anatomy For this reason our models are used in many areas, such as educational material, TV documentaries, advertising, print artwork etc.
Geetesh: Are there any easy 3D app that users can work with to reposition and render your models if they don’t have a 3D background?
Guy: Our models are built using Autodesk Softimage, the same software that's implemented by many large Hollywood studios to create special effects for movies. This allows users to be extremely flexible with our product, offering them the ability to edit just about any aspect of the 3D models in our collection in order to suit their unique requirements. Unfortunately for this freedom does come at a cost and one therefore does require at least a basic knowledge of one of the more high-end 3D packages, such as 3ds Max, Softimage, Maya, Lightwave or similar.
Having said that, there are some very basic software programs available that do allow one to open 3D models, view them, by rotating, zooming in and ultimately exporting still images as JPEGs. One such program is called Deep Exploration by Right Hemisphere. While this software is very basic and will not allow for any editing of the 3D models in any way, it is user-friendly for beginners. This application is also a great tool for converting file formats.
Labels: 3d, anatomy, clip art, interview, medicine, visuals
Echo Swinford (pictured to the right) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she's not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the co-author of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, published by Que. She also creates tons of presentations for the medical industry -- you can contact her for your presentation requirements through her site: Echo's Voice.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and the PowerPoint work you do in the medical industry.
Well, I started working for a medical education communications company in 1997. The owner was considering outsourcing her slide work, but she was worried about quality control. I knew my quality control was good in general, so I proposed that she let me create her slides. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t really know PowerPoint, so when she agreed, I had to learn it – and learn it fast!
I think my background in journalism and desktop publishing has really helped me with slide development, especially if you think of it as page layout on a large scale. I know that my proofreading skills are a definite plus, and the fact that I’m a bit of a math and puzzle geek sure hasn’t hurt!
Here I am, 11 years later, still developing presentations for a variety of industries. In the healthcare and medical education industry specifically, I do a lot of slide cleanup work, making presentations consistent and visible for conferences and meetings as well as developing collateral materials like scientific posters and syllabi. I also do a lot of promotional decks, speaker-led presentations, CME materials, and stand-alone enduring education modules that are distributed in a variety of ways. In addition, I can often be found with the production crew backstage at meetings, running speaker review or minding the presentation equipment. I love being self-employed, so I have the opportunity to do all of those things and more (like write PowerPoint books!).
Geetesh: What sets the presentations created for medicine to be different than conventional PowerPoints?
Echo: Honestly, I don’t know that there is such a thing as a “conventional” PowerPoint! PowerPoint is used in so many ways….
One thing common to many medical presentations, though, is the sheer amount of data-driven slides. That means lots of charts, lots of tables, and lots of really text-heavy slides. I find that the extreme mix of chart slides is always a challenge in medical presentations – more so than with what I see in other industries. For example, it’s not unusual for a medical presenter to want four or six very small charts on a slide, with the goal of comparing various studies or compounds at different stages. Therefore, understanding what point the speaker wants to make becomes imperative to the design of the slide. If you can eliminate or at least downplay the extraneous information, you can emphasize what’s important – what the audience should remember.
So, maybe after this four-chart slide, there’s a column chart. Then a line chart, then a pie chart, then a column chart with a trend line. Some have error bars, some don’t. Some slides have two or three or four charts, others have just one. The challenge is making all of these different charts look like a cohesive set, especially when the data varies so greatly. It’s also important to understand what types of charts show what types of data the best so you can advise your clients appropriately.
When you toss in text-heavy slides, it’s important for the presentation developer to understand what’s important and what can be moved into speaker notes or downplayed on the slide. Some text slides work better as tables, especially if the text has lots of numbers and specific data.
And then, of course, there’s always the struggle with where to place references, P-values, and acronym definitions, and it’s not unusual to have a lot of all of those on an individual slide! That extreme amount of “fine print” just isn’t as much of an issue in the presentations I work on for other industries. And finding some of the symbols used in medical presentations can be an adventure, too.
Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint
Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.
Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.
Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.
We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.
At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.
We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)
Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.
Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.
They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.
More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.
Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.
Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. "You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!".
Note: This interview originally appeared on Indezine.com -- here's a link to the post...
Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint, visuals
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Sang-Eun Lee graduated with Master of Arts from the School of Arts in Korea, and works in the areas of medical illustration and photography for the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. She is a PowerPoint power user who uses a variety of advanced features for creation of Samsung Medical Center Template Designs, Q&A slides, and other stuff. Her projects are used by doctors for oral presentations or posters at symposiums, scientific lectures, learning books, and theses. In this conversation, Sang-Eun talks about her PowerPoint workflow.