The Association of Medical Illustrators 2024 annual conference just took place in Rochester NY, USA. This was a big event for me--I not only attended, I was also on the conference planning committee and presented a tech showcase on using the node-based compositing system of DaVinci Resolve! Naturally I had to make a podcast about the experience:
Day 1: Wednesday, 24th of July 2024
For some the conference began on Wednesday, July 24th, if they were attending official association governance meetings, taking the Certified Medical Illustrator (CMI) exam, or if they were attending half- or full-day workshops. I took part in the museum sketching workshop held at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. This was run by an all-star team of professional medical illustrators: Sarah Gluschitz, Linden Pederson, Laura Roy, and one of my former guests on the podcast, Andrew Swift.
We started off with each of these folks talking about what they pack in their kits to bring to museums and how they approach sketching in this kind of environment. We got to spend all day at the museum and wander the exhibits. We also got a bespoke tour of the museum’s private collection which included taxidermized animals, some of which are now extinct.
Here are some sketches I made at the Rochester Museum & Science Center full day sketching workshop, with the subjects below. I drew a Dunkleosteus Terelli fossilized fish skull using ink pens, gel pens and alcohol markers, and a Roosevelt Elk head and antlers in black ink. I had decided ahead of time to not attempt color, so I could keep things simple.
Other workshops
The museum sketching was a full day workshop but I did want to list out the other workshops in case you want to plan for the next conference. Here’s a taste of what you might expect: there was “An Introduction to Molecular Nodes” using Blender with Brady Johnson, “Exploring Anatomy through Dissection of Lightly Embalmed Cadavers” always a high-demand workshop as access to cadavers to draw from, really rare, this had actually 2 sessions–one in the morning and another in the afternoon, Mr Jim Perkins from RIT and my last podcast episode was hosting this one.
We also had “Incorporation of FIGMA for Vector Biomedical Illustration” with John King. Man that FIGMA, people who use it really seem to love it. Then there was also an “Intro to Gravity Sketch VR” by Wes Price and Chi-Chun Liu. A big thanks to all these folks running workshops and providing a fun-filled first day to the conference for those who signed up. Highly recommended. I think all of these workshops are worth every penny.
Salon opening
Shortly after that we reconvened at the conference venue for the Salon opening. Always a stimulating and inspiring experience to walk through the gallery of artwork from student and professional medical illustrators putting out their best, most recent work on display in a big room–I’m talking several aisles to walk up and down. One of the benefits you get from the Salon is paying attention to the trends you see. There are certain recurring themes, there are certain names that keep showing up, and you start to see patterns and get a feel for what other people are using. When new tools and techniques hit the scene you get a sense of what has lasting power and where the fundamentals shine. Such a great time and the absolute best time and place for networking–the opening night of the Salon.
Mentorship Mixer
Immediately after that we had an after-hours mixer for the Mentorship program. So many great folks in the room that night, I really enjoyed chatting with so so many people, honestly the evening flew by. 2 hours felt like ten minutes. It was a great way to kick off the conference. If you are wondering anything along the lines of “How do I get into the field?”, “How do I level up my game?”, “How do I keep up with all the changes in technology?” THIS is the answer, in my opinion, to all those questions at once–the AMI Mentorship program. You will get paired up with someone who has overlapping interests and you guys will then tag team each other’s challenges and build a professional relationship. It’s awesome and I highly recommend it.
Day 2: Thursday, 25th of July 2024
President’s Address
The first official day of the conference was Thursday, July 25th kicking off with a welcome announcement and President’s Address from AMI President Todd Buck. Todd began with what he called the “Pyramid of C’s” the foundation of which being the “commission,” or hiring of an illustrator to begin work. From the commission we move up the pyramid into the concept, then narrow down the content in the next level up, then moving up again and narrowing down even further we have composition, and finally at the very top, and only after these other foundational elements are put in place, do we then create. There were a few book recommendations throughout this presentation, which included “Curious?” by another Todd, Todd Kashdan, and “Your Brain on Art” by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.
Lisa Bailey Keynote
Next was the Keynote presentation by my recent podcast guest, retired FBI Forensic Artist Lisa Bailey! Lisa gave an incredible talk covering many highlights of her career and showcasing a deep dive on the technical process of forensic facial approximations. She shared some archival photos of old school 3D computer approximations, and tissue depth charts which I’m sure she was revisiting and revising over and over throughout her career. She also shared a step-by-step walkthrough of her production process starting with the eye placement, followed by the eyelids, nose, cheeks, then forehead, in that order. Then the lips and mouth, the naso-labial fold, which being almost completely soft tissue would typically represent the average. At the end the hair would be sculpted as opposed to using a wig and this was intentional, as I think she mentioned in our conversation, so as to remove color information and not influence the viewer--a recurring theme in her approach.
Lisa wrapped up with some really fun case examples, and shared some artistic examples–moreso examples of what they wouldn’t do and why. These are still fun to look at if you’re interested, specifically she had mentioned royaltynowstudios.com and thelivingface.com so check those out and be sure to check out our interview for even more references and resources. Oh and lastly, Lisa did share some findings from the “Body Farm” project that she was instrumental in making happen. She spoke about this in our interview and in her book, "Clay and Bones: My Life as an FBI Forensic Artist". It was exciting to have some of the data they could pull from that study. Overall a fantastic keynote presentation and very well-received.
Mia Brownell
After a short break we returned to see the McLatchie Fine Arts Lecture with “Exploring the Intersection of Art, Science, and Culture in Mia Brownell’s Surreal Still Life Paintings”. Mia’s work was predominantly oil paintings, many of which featured translucent orbs forming what could be molecules or floating bubbles or a suspended grapes kind of vibe. She would go on to explain they were intended to imitate grapes as often seen in renaissance paintings. She began with her “Zoonotic Tonic“ series, one of several series of paintings she walked us through talking about her influences, motivations, and a bit of her process. I’ll share a link in the show notes so you can visit her site and see more of these. She had shared images from her “Plate to Platelets” series, which were paintings she did from 2016 - 2019 , “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting” paintings from 2011-2015, “Stomach Acid Dreams” a series from 2009 - 2010, and “Adventures of a Reluctant Omnivore” 2006–2008, among others. I think it may have been her entire body of work she included in the talk!
I like this idea too of grouping work in a collection that revolves around a central theme, maybe this is a thing in the fine arts world, but it’s inspired me to look at my own work in this way as well. Mia mentioned that a recurring theme for her in her work is exploring what it means to be human in a biotech world. Food and physiology, protein-inspired forms, and momentum mori were visual elements she explored and employed in her compositions. She noted her use of dark backgrounds to enhance a sense of depth and pay homage to scientific conventions for the use of black backgrounds to study structure. Black backgrounds are something I’ve been playing with quite a bit in my 3D rendering experiments and it works well to disguise the scale and edges of forms and allows them to recede or emerge from that darkness in ways they can’t or won’t from a flat white background which implies a very different light and atmosphere.
Mia points out that food is our ultimate interaction with nature, that food was the first medicine, and that food is the answer to the riddle of what can a woman successfully objectify? She pulled no punches on injecting political commentary into her work with the presence of bees and butterflies calling attention to our vulgar use of pesticides and our overindulgent meat consumption fueling the ever-concerning smoke signal of climate change. Brownell seeks to use still life as an expressive end, and opposed to an end to itself. The ubiquitous presence of grape-like spheres in her work being iconic of European still life paintings, she employs them to invoke protein-inspired forms connecting our hidden mental worlds of visual abstraction with the hidden microscopic worlds of molecular biology. The daughter of a sculptor and biophysicist, Mia Brownell has found a space within the overlap of art and science unique among us, and I found her work illuminating, as well as mesmerizing.
Levent Efe and AMI GO
I learned at this meeting that Dr. Levent Efe--a medical illustrator based in Australia but Turkish in origin–is launching a program called AMI Global Outreach, or AMI GO. I think this is amazing and I can’t wait to learn more about it and help out with it. I think this is the future of the field and I love it. From the leaflet he was circulating:
AMI-GO is an initiative started by Dr. Levent Efe, CMI, to inform and inspire the world about the profession of medical illustration. The purpose of this outreach is to demonstrate and show the unique skill set required to be a medical illustrator and the diverse job titles and media that make up this unique profession…Monthly sessions will be led by hosts from the AMI, including…guest speakers.”
Anyone who is interested in becoming a host (I presume this implies you either already have some international contacts or you speak a second language other than English) or if you just want to get involved, you can contact Dr. Efe directly at levent@leventefe.com.au
David Newhoff
Following lunch on Thursday, we had copyright expert, freelance writer and policy advocate David Newhoff speaking on Generative AI and Artist’s Rights. In this presentation Mr Newhoff helped to provide an update on the legal landscape of generative AI. Currently we have all seen and experienced that accuracy in medical and scientific visuals is simply not present in generative AI. That being said, the capabilities of generative AI will certainly continue to improve and inevitably become part of our production process. It’s important and valuable to be aware of the litigation surrounding generative AI–there are currently several major lawsuits underway. Each of these is essentially asking the same question which I’m taking to be “Who is the author of this work?” Three major lawsuits that will lay the groundwork for future policy are:
NY Times suing Microsoft and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, over text generation they argue were pulled from news articles
With song lyrics, a different form of text generation, we see music publisher Concord et al, ABKCO & Universal Music Group (UMG) et al sue Anthropic (a competitor of ChatGPT, maker of the LLM Claude)
UMG has another lawsuit along with Sony and Warner against AI music generators Suno and Udio over sound recordings
As of this writing, content that is 100% generated by AI is NOT protected by US copyright–those works are not eligible for copyright and that is a problem for many medical illustrators and the clients we work for. Retaining ownership is crucial for being able to reuse and repurpose your own work in the day-to-day business of a medical illustration company, and ownership is essential for brand identity for corporate clients.
As David put it, the “sweat of the brow” still holds value, in fact this is a legal term related to authorship. Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine whereby an author attains rights from the time and effort invested in creating a work, entitling them to legal protections. Where we’re seeing this take shape in copyright law in regards to generative AI is a future where we will likely have to put more effort into demonstrating the process–putting the onus on creators to prove their role in creation. I was just reading this great book “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon, highly recommend it, and he puts a positive spin on this practice so please do check that out.
The final take-home message from Mr Newhoff’s talk was that the US Copyright Office is going to take a while to sort all this out. It’s best to err on the side of caution and avoid generative AI use for final production work, as this is going to be a point of vulnerability. I got a chance to speak with David at the Salon opening and he was really knowledgeable about other adjacent areas of copyright law. I highly encourage folks to check out his beautifully designed website at davidnewhoff.com, he’s also got another site full of juicy articles at illusionofmore.com writing more focused on navigating and making sense of this digital age in which we all inhabit.
Jacqueline Mason
Next up was Jacqueline Mason from Osso VR. Jackie gave us a “A Glimpse into Game Development Pipelines: Creating Real-Time Ready 3D Art” walking us through the major production process stages and considerations for developing 3D assets for real time rendering use in game engines. If you’ve never ventured into the world of 3D asset creation, this talk was a fantastic overview of the major steps involved and how model geometry and texture maps have to be optimized for fluid playback in a gaming production.
Bill Westwood
Wrapping up the Thursday talks was the legendary Bill Westwood, presenting “The Role of Medical Illustration in the Evolution of Transsphenoidal Pituitary Surgery”--this talk was awesome. Known for being a guru of all things business and contract related in medical illustration work, Bill is also a seasoned expert on surgical illustration having worked at the Mayo clinic for many years and running a successful medical-legal business. Bill took us through the entire history of the Transsphenoidal Pituitary procedure from its origins in ancient Egypt to the modern era, citing the names of many surgeons who were key players in refining, revising and revitalizing this procedure. This was especially interesting to see so many names of famous medical illustrators show up including none other than Max Brödel himself, and Tom Jones–the two individuals from whom all graduate programs in North America trace their lineage. I feel this talk should really be captured on video and shared widely–this was an incredible demonstration of the value we bring as medical illustrators well-versed in not only visual communication but the science and medical knowledge we continually refine throughout our careers as well.
Day 3: Friday, 26th of July 2024
Dr Lynn McKinley-Grant
The Friday program began with Dr Lynn McKinley-Grant on the importance of diverse medical illustration in the field of dermatology. Dr McKinley-Grant’s presentation began with the analogies between skin condition descriptive terminology and classical art fundamentals such as harmony, variety, emphasis, gradation, balance and proportion, rhythm and movement. She demonstrated how life threatening changes can go unnoticed in clinical settings to patients of darker skin tones. Red is frequently associated with infection or inflammation, and gray with low oxygen or dangerously low hemoglobin, but doctors can miss these signs. Family members can and will frequently detect when something’s off regardless of skin tone, so the importance of careful listening and thorough history taking in the clinic is crucial. She also touched on color perception through the use of computer monitors and how that may affect a diagnosis, and of course the importance of inclusivity in medical illustrations to increase accuracy and thus better outcomes, increase trust and decrease health disparities.
AMI Diversity Fellows
These lessons carried over into the next set of talks, in the AMI Diversity Fellows presentations. I’ve mentioned the Johnson & Johnson project in previous episodes so I'll be sure to provide a link for that in the show notes. Unfortunately Ezgi Bozogullanndan was unable to join us, but we heard from Sami Brussels, Ni-ka Ford, Tiffany Fung, Lucia Fenanda Garces Torres, Sarah Gluschitz, Moriam Howlader, Sana Khan, Lilith Lawrence, and Tal Bavli Ziv. This series of quick talks gave the audience a chance to hear from each creator in their own words the unfolding stories of their work and inspirations. In particular I found the story behind Ni-Ka Ford’s Arcus Senilus piece and her story about how this condition had been a toxic doubt haunting her father for years, finally coming to a resolution for her and her family with this work. Each of these illustrators completed several pieces in the project, please check out the site illustratechange.com to see the final results from this group of talented medical illustrators.
Dr Jeroen Claus
The final talk of the morning set was from Dr Jeroen Claus, “Accidental bioinformatics: When data viz becomes data science”. Dr Claus is the founder of Phospho, a biomedical animation studio based in London, UK. Jeroen did his PhD on investigating quote “the nuts and bolts of a baffling family of proteins called pseudokinases” at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute. Jeroen is known for being an expert user of the Houdini software which he made extensive use of in his work–the results of which he shared throughout his talk. He also gave a presentation on making the switch to Houdini for medical animation work in 2020 to the BMC alumni group.
Awards Ceremony
Lunch on Friday was followed closely by the Awards Ceremony. I want to extend a congratulations to all the winners throughout all student and professional categories. The 2024 Salon resulted in, I believe, 25 Awards of Excellence, 25 Awards of Merit, and 5 Social Impact Awards being bestowed. Congratulations to all the Salon winners!
Betsy Palay
I also want to recognize this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award to Betsy Palay, to quote the program brochure: “...whose extraordinary, lifelong contributions to the advancements of medical illustration and scientific knowledge have set the highest standards of our profession and served as an inspiration to others in the field.” Well that describes Betsy Palay quite precisely!
Betsy graduated from the University of Michigan’s Medical Illustration program, receiving her BFA in 1973 and MS in 1975. Betsy is a co-creator of the Picture as Portal S.P.A.R.K. course, available on Thinkific. I think I’ve mentioned this in previous episodes but this is a perfect way for people who can’t commit to a formal training program through school to gain insights into the skills needed to create effective teaching visualizations. Betsy has been an educator throughout her career, teaching at the University of Michigan, University of California San Francisco, and Stanford. She has received over 140 professional awards–that is astounding. Her work has been selected for exhibits and publications including The Art of Medicine, Museum of American Illustration, and the Hungarian Academy of Science just to name a few. She has also been a professional member of the AMI for over 40 years, she became an AMI Fellow in 1988, board certified in 1993 and served as AMI President during the 2009-2010 term. Again just a sampling of her contributions to the Association and the field. Well-deserved and clearly earned. Thank you Betsy, for all you’ve done on behalf of our profession.
James Perkins
This year’s Brödel Award for Excellence in Education was awarded to none other than James Perkins of the RIT program. If you listened to my last episode you will have heard some of Jim’s fine achievements in the field including his contributions in the accreditation process for the RIT program for MFA status. Professor Perkins is well versed in several areas of illustration work including anatomy, physiology, surgery, molecular, oncology, biotech, infectious disease and med legal. He is the sole illustrator for the "Robbins and Cotran" series of pathology texts, and 1 of the 3 medical illustrators continuing the work of the late Frank Netter. Congratulations Jim on this latest achievement.
New Fellows
Closing out the awards ceremony we witnessed the induction of several new AMI Fellows. This is, and again from the program brochure, quote, “Formal and public recognition of those members who have generously contributed considerable time and effort to the Association in volunteer participation and service.” This year, the Association recognizes Michael Boasso, Annie Gough, Autumn Kulaga-Engoren, Dr Julia Lerner, SJ Okemow, Charles aka Wes Price, and Mark Schornak. Congratulations to each of you and thank you for your ongoing contributions to the profession!
Concurrent talks
The conference program for the rest of Friday was arranged in concurrent talks which I was therefore only able to catch a few of, but I’m still going to make a few comments on all of them so you get a complete sense of the conference highlights.
Michael Corrin
BMC professor Michael Corrin presented “Out with the old and in with the new...colour models!” I have to be honest with you all. I have known Michael Corrin for many years, but when I saw the name of this talk, I did not think that it would be as exciting as it ended up being.
The pursuit Michael had been driven by is a common frustration to anyone who works in digital color for an extended period of time, which is that those HSB and HSL sliders in your color picker just don’t give you the color you want or expect sometimes. This can cause problems when working because medical illustrations will frequently use tonal contrast to create salience or focal areas. We want control over what happens in the tonal range and color choice can sometimes undo that. To quote one of Michael’s slides “The perceptual colour models –HSV, HSB, and HSL–distort the perceptual dimensions of colour.” And he showed this.
There are 3D color visualization tools and apps that can demonstrate this better but verbally, I think what he showed is, essentially you don’t get an even distribution of color choices available to you when you change between color hues. So in this talk Michael clued us all into an alternative color model that has addressed this problem, the OKLab, or OKLCH which is perceptually consistent. Unfortunately it is currently only available for a small number of platforms, but those platforms include Safari, Figma, and Nuke, which are some major players in their respective markets so we may see extended adoption in the future.
Dr Sarah Chen
Dr Sarah Chen presented The HeART of Surgery, unfortunately I didn’t catch this one. I know! I should be at every surgery talk. Please forgive me. This did sound really interesting, and similar to TVASurg in several aspects, so it really spoke to my heart: using visual aids to explain complex anatomy, customizing your visualizations to specific patients. But oh man, listen to this, this is from the program text: “This talk will cover the extensive utility of art—from simplified drawings to customized 3D printed models—in cardiothoracic surgery, from augmenting patient education, promoting research and clinical didactics, facilitating pre-operative planning, and fostering resident wellness. This talk will also provide a review of cardiac and thoracic anatomy, including intra-operative views that are not readily intuitive to understand when compared to the standardly drawn anteroposterior views.” I am bummed I missed this. Dr. Chen PLEASE do a webinar, this would be phenomenal!
Brittany Bennett
So I did see Brittany Bennett present “Establishing a Medical Illustration Practice in a Pediatric Radiology Department.” And again, kindred spirit in the world of Healthcare institutions. Brittany came to this talk from the perspective of someone who had really done some serious administrative management work, asking important questions such as “Who is my team?” and “Where’s my support?” Brittany shared some hard-earned advice and observations–I found myself bobbing my head to all of this: When you’re working inside a hospital, you need a white coat, you need that MD representation, and and you need a “day-to-day contact”, like a Surgical Fellow, or Admin, usually one of those two for us, but someone who is ever so slightly less booked than your “White coat”. Define your department scope. Network within your institution. High-impact short deadlines get triaged to the front of your production line.
David Aten
David Aten presented “Designing Patient-Specific Anatomical Models for Surgical Planning in Orthopedic Oncology.” Unfortunately I had to make a tough choice and missed this one in order to catch Brittany Bennett, but check this out from the program: “Managing pelvic tumors presents many challenges in both tumor resection and reconstruction of the bony anatomy…Using scan data, a 3D model can be produced that gives surgeons a tactile, 3-dimensional representation of the patient's anatomy. These models are of value to the surgeons for assessing tumor size and positioning, and give them an accurate depiction of anatomy that can be saved, and anatomy that must be removed..” Similar as we do at TVASurg, using scan data to produce patient-specific 3D models. OK. But it sounds like they are using 3D prints which is another layer of production stages, but that’s great if they’re doing lots of these cases. “This presentation will present participants with the challenges inherent in pelvic tumor resections...” I hope they put together an exhibit of their collection one day, that would be extraordinary. I’m there.
Tech Talks
Next up were the Tech Talks and I can only really speak to one of these–my own! I did a talk titled “Compositing 3D renders with DaVinci Resolve’s Fusion” This has been my latest pastime. We’ve been using DaVinci Resolve for video editing at TVASurg for several years now, finding it has excellent performance and render speed. I wanted to show conference attendees how the free version of Fusion, which is a node-based compositing application by Blackmagic Design, built-in to DaVinci Resolve is a legit alternative to After Effects. You can use it for 3D render pass compositing, 2D animations, text labels, whatever you can do in AE, you can do with Fusion nodes. And this software is totally free. It’s nuts!
DaVinci Resolve is a video editing and color grading freeware. Over time they’ve added lots of new features including a light but functional version of Fusion and a sweet audio editing space. I love this software, I’ve been using it for years and it is often one of the least stressful apps in my arsenal because I get the least amount of crashes, freezes and lag. There is a bit of a learning curve because node-based compositing is a departure from what you might be used to with the layer system in After Effects, but I wanted to try and smooth out and reduce the steepness of that learning curve as much as possible. I hope this panned out for those in attendance. I’m already working on some tutorial updates once I figure out how to do the tricks and techniques folks have asked me about, so stay tuned.
There was also “An Introduction to Substance Painter for 3D Materials” presented by Emi Frohn & Caitlin Morris. Substance is really cool. If you haven’t used this yet, as described in the program: “Substance allows you to quickly create custom, highly detailed materials for use in 3D animation or illustration or 3D printing. Emi and Caitlin demonstrated how to prep models for import into the software, how to create textures and materials within Substance, how to use masks and generators and how to export and utilize.”
Anastasiya Kurylyuk presented “Mixed Reality Teaching Tools in Higher Education”, with demonstrations of several mixed reality (MR) apps for the Microsoft HoloLens. These were developed by the team at the Interactive Commons (IC) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
There was tech talk on “Nomad Sculpt” by Vanessa Dudley. I really wish I could have checked this one out. Nomad as I understand it is a tablet-based app that’s an up-and-coming competitor to ZBrush. Now, I’ve been a long-time fan of ZBrush but there are a lot of folks out there who just can’t get over some of those ZBrush hurdles like the UI and overall user experience with the app. I get it. So, Nomad Sculpt might be something to check out.
Sarah Faris was hosting a new and unique form of tech talk. This was an “Open Mic: Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator” knowledge sharing session. OoooOooo. Man, I would have loved to see this. I think this could make for a great Zoom meetup one day too. I bet lots of people would be up for that.
Last but not least, Nancy Ji from BioHues Digital presented “Transforming Your Business Workflow Using Notion”. This is one of those apps I feel everyone should know about and be using in our field. Notion has had a transformative impact on my team, we use it for almost everything related to project management. In this talk it sounds like Nancy showed some of its automation capabilities and how to organize business workflows.
Would love to have seen these other Tech Talks. Most of what I showed you can be found in the Fusion Compositing video I put out on YouTube through the TVASurg channel. I also made a blog post with all the steps written out in text for ease of navigation. We may have to pester the other presenters to do webinars as well. I leave that up to the audience, if anything I just reported on sounds like something you’d love to learn more about, reach out to the AMI or the presenter and see if they’d be up to arrange a webinar.
Day 4: Saturday, 27th July 2024
Dr Claudia Krebs
Saturday began with Dr Claudia Krebs, “An Ethical Future for Anatomy Visualization”. This would definitely fulfill the history of medical illustration continuing education credits, for any CMI’s out there. Dr Krebs hails from the University of British Columbia or UBC. The unethical past was laid bare in this presentation. A revisiting of the infamous and nefarious Pernkopf, and other, Nazi anatomy atlases. I saw on the program for the AAA Anatomy Connected conference I reported on in the Spring, they also had a session discussing this topic. Here we see anatomy framed as a transgression. As Dr Krebs began her talk with, contrasting the opening and closing of surgery with the transgressive cavitation of cadavers for dissection. These de-individualized bodies then serve as the basis for modern medical education. With consent, we assume. But historically not always the case.
The now infamous example of which I’ve already mentioned, the Pernkopf anatomy atlas, is a sordid tale of harvesting knowledge from the unwilling. During WWII the Nazis not only committed genocide on a vulgar scale but tortured and inflicted misery in new and disgustingly creative ways. In the specific instance of which I speak, victims of this war were selected for execution to be used as cadaveric dissection models, the resulting renditions of which formed the now-infamous Pernkopf atlas, and others. Dr Krebs went to great lengths to uncover the identities of many of these victims and shared with us, under a sympathetic shroud of communal respect and dignification–an understanding of no photos to be taken of the presentation slides–images of the anatomy drawings that were produced from these victims, along with details surrounding the circumstances of their capture.
Fast-forward to today, and we find the internet littered not only with copies of images from Nazi anatomy atlases, but copies of those copies. It is an unfortunate recurrence that people will copy the work of previous medical illustrators in any case, but especially here, we have these evil crimes reborn in modern work. This makes for a good time to point out the importance of original sourcing of reference material. I think this is one of the most important lessons those of us seasoned in the field must pass on to every new generation of initiates–use good references and always try to draw from the source.
Roxy and Shay
Next up we began what would be a series of talks on the hot-topic of AI. “Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on biomedical visualization: Perspectives and Prospects” was presented by Roxanne Ziman and Shehryar Saharan (unfortunately Dr Gael McGill was unable to join us but he is the third player of the triumvirate involved in this research study) to help us form a broader and more neutral view of generative AI. The format of this talk was really engaging, they would occasionally pause and poll the audience, and show that data live on screen as they navigated their slides. It was a great way to pull the audience into this research.
So the purpose of the larger study they were discussing was to answer 3 questions:
What are the perceptions and attitudes towards generative AI?
How is genAI currently being used in the profession, and how will and should it be in the future?
What are the key concerns?
Some of the findings from their work: There is a clear preference for use of genAI in pre-production rather than later stages. Current use for pre-production work has been some use in ideation, general visual concepts, and scripts. In production it’s being used for coding and voice over, in the future we may see it being used more for 3D mesh cleanup, resolving technical issues, and uprezzing. Creating at low resolution and then scaling up without pixelating your image. Some of the perspectives they shared from the study: Human agency and control is number 1. Task automation is a close second, this is where people see this going. Perhaps it can serve the role of a creative collaboration. There may be some subdomain specializations that remain to be an advantage. We have to define the line between creativity and fulfillment. I like how they ended this talk with a shout out to Todd Buck’s “C”s address. These are the core of what we do and will continue to be.
Dr Julia Lerner
Concurrently, Dr Julia Lerner, an Emergency Medicine Resident Physician in Newport News, VA, had been presenting “HALO:” Innovations in Accessible Simulation Models for Emergency Procedures.” Wow, an emergency medicine resident physician. Now that’s a title. Dr. Lerner demonstrated simulations for healthcare workers to practice and improve responses in emergency scenarios. From the conference program quote “The session will combine visual representations, hands-on demonstrations, and case studies to provide a comprehensive look at novel simulation models and their applications.” That’s really cool.
Niámh Mundy
Niámh Mundy, from Jeroen Claus’s company Phospho, gave what I think was the AI talk everyone was waiting to hear. I may have misunderstood a few aspects of this study so bear with me but I think what they had done here was they were looking to see if we can train an AI art model to have more accurate depictions of scientific topics, and they wanted to look at DNA specifically. So they made some animated clips of DNA using Houdini. They animated it in such a way so that over the course of this short animation clip, each frame of the animation would cover a wide range of possible orientations and compositions that DNA could appear as in a framed image. So the DNA strand in their animation would bend and twist and move at different angles, this results in many shots where there is a dramatic plane change, sort of like looking down the barrel of a gun if you were aiming a rifle let’s say, but imagine the rifle barrel is a strand of DNA and this is important because these dramatic angle compositions will then result in very strong depth of field blurs in medical animations, here I don’t think they used a DOF blur it was just that point of view but that makes it disorienting to look at, at first glance you might not recognize it as DNA. OK. And they also altered the appearance of this DNA on the animations to look more or less like a ribbon, so there was an adjustment to the degree of abstraction. And they ended up, after rendering all these animation clips out, with~27,000 images.
I know this terminology gets confusing but when I say “model” this isn’t the same as a 3D model, it does eventually become a file, sometimes referred to as a “checkpoint”, but it’s essentially a modified version of the AI dataset, that is customized for a certain look, in other words it is weighted towards producing results of a specific style, or aesthetic. Some AI art models have been catered towards a more photorealistic look for example, or for architecture, or for Pixar characters. I think style is one way to put it. I’m going to include a few links in the show notes to some articles, videos and interviews that explain this all a bit better. In particular I want to take another opportunity to recommend an interview I’ve referenced before. If you haven’t already listened to the Collective podcast interview with Steve Zapata, please do check that out–it’s a really good one:
So that’s what they did here was use these images of DNA to train a bespoke image generation model. They then prompted that model to generate images of DNA to see how accurate they would be. They did this in repeated runs of image generations, I think they called these “epochs” to get a large sample size. If I recall correctly, I believe over their first 4 epochs, they only got 2 usable images, and over another 46 epochs, so 50 in total, that number only climbed up to 19 I think it was. So, only around 2% of the images were considered “good” and roughly half considered “null” or completely useless. Again this was with an input of 27,000 training images leading to low quality results. So not very impressive.
A point that was made here which I’ve also experienced firsthand is that genAI images have limitations in editability. I’m sure people are out there right now furiously working on making generative AI art models that can provide alpha channels or even layers. If and when that happens that’s going to be huge, but for the time being, I think the speaker summed it up nicely at the end of the talk by saying diffusion models don’t have any ideas about anatomical relationships (including molecular anatomy), they only know pixel relationships.
Now I have seen people make successful custom models with Stable Diffusion using their own images but I would describe those more as style models and definitely more in the vein of abstract art. I haven’t seen anything yet that captures accurate human anatomy or cellular or biomolecular structures by any stretch. So the results from this study were in line with my own awareness of the tech and I think they’ve done us all a great service by setting up and running this experiment with hard numbers and nicely done data visualizations throughout the talk I might add.
Dr Kimberly Hoggart Krumweide and David Aten
Dr Kimberly Hoggart Krumweide and David Aten co-presented on “Exploring the Use of Virtual Reality in Cancer Rehabilitation and Survivorship in Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Patients.” The second presentation by David Aten at the conference, good on you man. That’s not easy to pull off. From the conference program: “Adolescent and Young Adult patients face unique challenges, both physically and emotionally, during and after their cancer treatments. Virtual reality (VR) emerges as a promising tool to address these challenges, offering immersive and engaging experiences that can positively impact their rehabilitation journey…This presentation will delve into the conceptualization and development of VR applications …[guiding] participants through an exploration of the use of virtual reality in cancer rehabilitation and survivorship for AYA patients.” Cool. That’s great to see there’s more VR applications being developed and this one sounds like it was a perfect fit for the target user group. I hope we see more of these kinds of projects in the future.
Joe Samson
Joe Samson presented “Summoning the AI Wizards: Navigating the Infinitely Evolving Terrain of NeRFS, GANS, Splats & MoCaps”. I know Joe has been experimenting with AI tools quite extensively over the past few years. I met up with him 2 years ago at the meeting in Des Moines Iowa I think it was and we got to chat briefly about what he’d been up to. So Joe had been doing this whole series of hypothetical organisms with generative AI, lots of alien-like microorganisms or something from a prehistoric era here on Earth. Joe is well-versed in this tech and well-qualified to share a perspective as a user. To give you a few definitions from his talk and understand what he was demo-ing:
NeRFs are Neural Radiance Fields, these are sort of like photogrammetry but not, they do produce geometry, but they do it with as little as 2 images of the same thing as opposed to many that are required for photogrammetry.
GANs stands for General Adversarial Network. This is the technical term for a machine learning framework. The Diffusion models we are familiar with today evolved out of GANs.
Splats refers to Gaussian Splatting, these are points clouds, what’s amazing is they can capture reflections and transparency, Joe had some examples that showed this,
MoCaps refers to motion capture. Joe shared several examples of animation generators such as Runway Gen2, Luma AI’s Dream Machine, Deforum (a Stable Diffusion plugin), Kaiber (this one looked like it was catered more towards 2D animation) and Pika (more cinematic, photorealistic looking videos).
Joe demonstrated how these tools can offer “rapid exploration, prototyping, and evolution of 3D modeling and environmental concepts”. Lastly, Joe also shared a few random AI tools that can be of immediate practical use such as TwoMinutePapers. He also recommends checking out the work of the AI artist who goes by mrk.ism. Really impressive, I applaud Joe for exploring and experimenting in a way that seeks a true marriage of AI capability with human art direction. He’s already there!
Hjordis Bjartmars
Running concurrently with Joe’s talk was (and I apologize because I’m totally going to mispronounce this, but I’ll give it my best shot) Hjordis Bjartmars (your-diss be-yardt-marrd), “The Use of Illustrations in Patient Education in Iceland”. I did not see this one, but I can read to you from the conference program: “an insightful session led by Hjördís Bjartmars, a Medical Illustrator specializing in patient education in Iceland through visual communication. Learn about her projects such as:
Empowering foreign women during pregnancy with a wordless picture book.
Facilitating communication for respirator-dependent patients.
Exploring the Stroke Alert App (SLAG) for swift emergency response.”
Well that’s great to see another international presenter, and that’s interesting that she’s creating patient education materials for immigrants to Iceland. Certainly an at-risk population from many aspects. It's great that there's someone with the passion and the skills to take on challenges like this and I’m glad Hjordis could come present at the AMI.
Kristen Browne
Kristen Browne from the NIH presented on “Using Python to Automate Tasks with a Little Help from AI” I did have the wonderful opportunity to chat with Kristen at one of the meal breaks earlier in the day so I got to hear a bit about this. Kristen Browne, if you don’t know her, Swiss army knife of medical illustration skills and scientific knowledge. Biomedical 3D Model Archivist. We should call her Kristen Brownian motion in a packed fact environment.
In this session, Kristen shared some practical applications of the Python programming language, using it to build efficiencies into 3D production pipelines. Her experience designing and developing the NIH 3D model sharing and creation platform positions her as an expert in technical direction for 3D. She showed how she’s been using Python to quote “...facilitate smooth file transitions between Blender, pyMeshLab, Trimesh, and other modules, consolidating a myriad of functions and features under a single command.” Incredible. Oh, and by the way, all the code she discussed in this session is freely available on GitHub.
SJ Okemow
Meanwhile, concurrent to Kristen’s talk was SJ Okemow “An Artist’s Practice-Based PhD Journey: Fusing Molecular Animation and Indigenous Ways of Knowing” This was a fascinating and electrifying talk. There was a recurring theme here of finding a balance and resolution between our necessary activity in digital spaces and our soulful longing to reconnect with the natural world. SJ began with an autobiographical description of her understanding of self-in-relation and a brief historical context of western scientific practice imposing incredible harm on indigenous communities. SJ then drew parallels between western science beliefs and indigenous ways of knowing, which to me was reminiscent of the book “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjov Capra. I appreciated the wealth of book recommendations given throughout this talk, a sampling of which included:
I appreciated the “Two-Eyed Seeing” section of this talk, the idea that 2 ways of knowing can coexist. I think we can all relate to that at some level coming into this profession where we have to balance, combine and contrast science and art, education and business. I also really liked towards the end the examples SJ gave of some of her experiments using audio, making her own recordings, using audio to set the mood of her workspace, and using audio to drive animations in Houdini. This talk was a captivating account of a researcher-artist’s still unfolding journey. Seeking out and implementing her own cultural heritage, revitalizing forgotten rhythms pulsing at the edges of her unique gaze. SJ’s talk indeed inspired, to quote her bio in the conference program: “...critical reflection on the ways in which we move through, exist within, and share our environments.”
Cameron Slayden
Following lunch, Microverse CEO and co-founder Cameron Slayden presented “How Diffusion Models Work, and other AI Discussions”. Cameron has previously presented on the topic of AI at AMI meetings, he’s also done a presentation for the BMCAA that you can find on YouTube, I’ll share a link to that in the show notes.
This was a good objective walk-through on the major species of AI tools we’re now interacting with and seeing results from. Cameron began by giving an overview of AI Diffusion models, which essentially see patterns in random noise. He also confirmed what I’m sure many of us suspected for years, which is that those “Capta” images we click on to prove we aren’t robots when creating new accounts or logging in to sites, were part of a training algorithm to help machine learning discern objects in scenes of everyday human life.
As I mentioned from Joe Samson’s talk, GANs or General Adversarial Networks were earlier machine learning frameworks, now falling into obsolescence. Diffusion models evolved from GANs, which use two neural networks communicating with each other to produce an end result: a generator and discriminator. The generator produces the noise patterns and the discriminator tries to identify patterns from within that noise to produce an image.
Cameron then went on to talk about RAG or (Retrieval Augmented Generation). This is, to quote an NVIDIA blog article written by Rick Merritt: “...a technique for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models with facts fetched from external sources.” From the same article, quote “large language models (LLMs) can respond to a wide variety of human queries. But to deliver authoritative answers that cite sources, the model needs an assistant to do some research.” OK interesting, so it sounds like this is an additional feature one can add on top of a LLM that you’ve built an app around giving it the ability to go beyond its base dataset without the time and cost of retraining a model. I may be misunderstanding this, but maybe this is a pathway towards what people are calling agenic AI, or AI agents that can be given specific assignments or tasks. Cameron mentioned “One-shot learning” vs “Zero-shot learning” in this section of the talk, these are types of machine learning training.
If I understand this correctly, One-shot learning is when a machine learning algorithm is trained to recognize a new class of objects or things with only one example to go off of. It then has to generalize or extrapolate new classes based on single examples of each class. Zero-shot learning on the other hand is when you tell the machine learning algorithm what something is without giving it an example of the thing. You just describe it and it has to go off of your description alone.
Next up, LLMs (Large Language Models), ChatGPT falls in this category. Also from the NVIDIA site, this one was a glossary page so no author listed, LLMs are: “deep learning algorithms that can recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate content using very large datasets.” So LLMs essentially track relationships between words, based on the word associations they’ve analyzed over a massive archive of text references. I think. I love how NVIDIA puts the effort into making these layman explainer pages on their site for knuckleheads like me who can barely understand what they’re talking about. Like you can keep up for a few sentences and then they get all technical and you’re like “Where am I? Am I awake? Am I inside the computer?” Haha. I can follow for only so long before my eyes start to glaze over. But hey, I’m trying. NVIDIA is trying. Cameron Slayden is trying. We’re all trying.
The second part of this talk was geared towards looking at what’s next. Cameron shared the work of several companies he’s either worked for or with and what they’re doing to use AI to drive and accelerate medical research. We are already seeing targeted drug delivery, the development of “safe” opioids, anti-aging drugs, and maybe even one day, re-growing teeth.
Cameron shared with us a glimpse into the future of AI development, what we may see especially in the biotech world. We’re already experiencing the 1st bottleneck which is figuring out what to fund? There is so much potential here but the resources and funding is limited so it’s a question of looking at potential impact, and the right fit between the tool and problem, which is always the case in scientific research. The 2nd bottleneck is what to review? We’re going to quickly see that the FDA can’t keep up with all the applications it’s going to be bombarded with. Government is notoriously slow when it comes to updating regulations and passing legislation. So, as always, we’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, I do agree with Cameron–we need to better understand AI so we can better understand its impact on our field and its impact on medicine, and in turn, its impact on our clients. As we look outward to the horizon into a maelstrom of change, may we rely on the consistent fact that the value we add, as always has been the case, is unique to our skills as medical illustrators and scientific communicators.
iso-Form
Rounding out the AI talks Nick Klein and Russ Adams presented “Harnessing the Power of AI: Boosting Efficiency, Productivity and Creativity Using AI Tools”. The iso-Form team always brings a lot of energy and humor to the stage.
They began with framing AI as a disruptor in its current state. Similar to how photography was to painting. I can't disagree with that! I think we’re all feeling this. With several recent in-house examples, Nick and Russ invite us to view AI as a powerful and helpful set of production tools, which I also agree with. I did a podcast stating exactly this (March 31st 2023). So we’re on the same page there. There are a lot of things AI is particularly good at, for example:
Procrastination busting
Brainstorming
Research (ELI5)
Client Communications
Reviewing or updating legal documents
Programming
Look & feel, character development, stylization, and inspiration
and Writing
This talk got me thinking again about a question I’ve been asking a lot of people recently, which is, “If you could design or build a custom AI tool to help you in your day-to-day work, what would you want?” Well, for one, I’d love to make/use an AI tool that will help me remember things I looked up already or suggest videos/articles based on tabs I never close. There’s probably one out there already that does that.
I’d also love something to help me ask clients the right questions to communicate that you care about their work. That was where I think Nick and Russ were steering in this talk and encouraging us to turn our perspective towards–making a better production experience and end result for our clients. How can we do this? How can we use powerful AI tools to get us there faster? iso-Form are the guys out there, asking the tough questions.
Melanie Connolly
The conference was concluded by a phenomenal presentation by Melanie Connolly, “Beyond the Canvas: Exploring New Avenues in Health Innovation for Medical Illustrators” Melanie’s career has taken new turns, and coupled with the challenges of raising a family have given her new insights about the American healthcare system. Melanie shared some of her new duties and roles that included
marketing, innovation and branding
web & app development,
project management,
patient and clinical education,
and international collaborations
I think this probably sounds familiar to a lot of us. Melanie then moved into the narrative of her talk, beginning with the need to find your “why” in what you do. I love the way she phrased this on one of her slides: “Scope creep will happen in your career-A “why” creates more directed choices.” This also speaks to the problem of burnout we know is common to our field and the adjacent healthcare and creative professional spaces. I really appreciated Melanie bringing this up to immediately offer a possible solution. She said to solve burnout, you need to lean into the problems you’re seeing and be able to affect change. I think that’s a wise observation.
Melanie spoke quite a bit about her own navigation and struggles with the US Healthcare system. A lot of this was personal so I don’t want to share too much of it without her having OK’d that. But in summary there were a lot of mishaps and misunderstandings, miscommunications and in a few cases straight up unprofessional conduct by healthcare workers she was interacting with and of course, then they send you a bill. It set a fire under her to take action and try to do something about it. Thankfully it sounds like things panned out such that no one was seriously harmed, but she shared some startling statistics such as “greater than 300,000 preventable deaths annually from 5 diseases” and “nearly 800,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled from diagnostic error each year” according to Johns Hopkins Researchers, as was reported in a BMJ Quality & Safety 2023 article.
Getting chewed up and spit out of the healthcare system is enough to cause anyone to repeatedly ask the universe “why”, especially when your career is so closely related to the system you’ve just been mistreated by. And this is where I felt the narrative of this story reach a crescendo point. The light at the end of this tunnel of torment was an enhanced sense of self reliance and recognition in one’s own expertise. It sounded like Melanie came to see her own value as an educated member of the healthcare network, and she shared with us a thorough list of what we bring to the table. This is just a sampling of what Medical Illustrators are good at:
Making order out of chaos
Navigating complexity and complex ambiguity
Being voracious learners
Focusing on the audience
Taking jumbled explanations from multiple experts and creating a succinct, actionable deliverable
Not only taking critique well, but actively seeking it out
staying on top of new technology
Understanding contracts
Being power connectors and KNOWING the value of a diverse network
These are skills and attitudes you don’t acquire overnight or without effort. I hope when listening to this list you started to form a mental picture, as I did, as I think Melanie has, of someone capable of working with a complex system, and initiating change from within. Debugging while the program is running. Yea, we are positioned to do that!
Melanie shared a wealth of resources in this talk. I want to share her booklist for personal development:
“Infinite Game” and “Start with Why” both by Simon Sinek
Resources for healthcare education included:
Thank you again to Melanie for this excellent talk, for sharing these resources, and for wrapping up the meeting with this inspiring and motivating window to a future we can build together as a community.
Planning Committee
Big shout out to the AMI meeting planning committee, which included, naturally, the RIT faculty from my last episode, Craig Foster, Jim Perkins and Glen Hintz. We also had Kaitlyn Mathews steering the ship, Katie Allen, Todd Buck, Emi Frohn, Nobles Green, Jill Gregory, Jason Sharp, Bill Westwood, Justin Klein, Brianna Monroe, Yana Hammond, and Scott Weldon. Oh, and yours truly! It was a lot of fun meeting up with the team over the last year getting everything pulled together.
Conference Sponsors
I also want to give a big shout out and thanks to this year’s meeting sponsors. We couldn’t pull this off without them. A huge thanks to our Visionary Sponsors Barrow Neurological Institute and Maxon. Premiere Sponsor Medical Illustration & Animation. Supporters Artery Studios, AXS Studio, BioRender, Gravity Sketch, Red Nucleus, xencelabs, and Patrons: Cognition Studio, Inc. and Mayo Clinic.
I hope you enjoyed this recap of the 2024 Association of Medical Illustrators conference. If you did, please leave a comment about your favorite part of the episode, and share it with someone you think would get a kick out of it. The 2025 Association of Medical Illustrators conference will be taking place in Grand Rapids Michigan. I believe on essentially the same dates, July 25-28 or some time around then. AND for the record, I never once touched ChatGPT for this podcast script--just sayin'. Thanks for checking this out!
--Paul Kelly
Medical illustrators galore! Lots of familiar faces at the conference. Picture above is Nick Woolridge, Shay Saharan, Nadine Tan, and Michael Konomos.
Lunch with legends! Pictured above are Andrew Swift, John Martini, Jerusha Ellis, David Killpack, Laura Roy, and Nicholas Reback.
Hey, Paul... nice recap! One small mistake... the BMC grad in the photo with Nick, Shay, and Michael is Nadine Tan, not Mimi Guo...