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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
OK -- this has nothing to do with PowerPoint, but it is a great lesson on how you can explain medical terminology so well with proper animation and a good script! Head to the NPR site to see this amazing video that shows you how a virus spreads within the human body.
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
Carmine Gallo is a communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. He is also the author of Fire Them Up, a book that teaches motivation and inspiration. His client list includes Intel, Chase, Barclays, IBM, Nokia, and many others. He is an Emmy award-winning journalist and former anchor, host, and business correspondent for CNN, Fox, CNET, and CBS. In this guest column, Carmine talks about the subject of personalizing your presentations with the human face.
The image of a human face can make a powerful impact. Attaching a patient's photo to his or her file makes radiologists feel "more connected" to the patient. The radiologists, in turn, provide "longer, more meticulous reports" for those patients, according to research presented at last December's annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America and recently reported in The New York Times.
Interestingly, at the same radiological conference the previous year, I helped a large medical equipment company create a presentation to introduce a breakthrough CT scan. While most presentations were data heavy, we chose to personalize the technology by introducing the audience to two fictional patients. We put a human face on the subjects by showing photographs of "David," a 62-year-old patient who walked into his doctor's office with chest discomfort, and "Susan," a 57-year-old who was taken to the emergency room after being found lying on her kitchen floor. Of course, these were hypothetical stories but they reflected scenarios in which the CT scan would be used. With each scenario, the presenters educated the audience about the technology and showed how, in each case, the new equipment could save lives by leading to a faster and more reliable diagnosis The presentation won an award by the Los Angeles chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
The presentation worked for the same reason radiologists take more care with X-rays that are accompanied by the patient's photo. Emotions govern decision-making. In Emotionomics, Dan Hill writes, "Humans are extremely visual: We think largely in images, not words." Hill explains that 80% of what humans retain is visually based. "It's important to be rationally on-message. But it's even more imperative to be on-emotion. A company's message will only be successful if it attracts interest and emotionally appeals to the receiver." Consider the following tips on making your own presentations resonate with your audience.
- Show real people using your product. Visit the Intel Web site. The home page introduces customers to average people who are using Intel products to improve their lives or their business. You'll read about a photographer who uses Intel-based systems for photo editing or an entrepreneur using the latest 3G-connected netbook to keep in touch when she travels. Intel builds and sells computer chips—products that few people ever see. Adding a face to the marketing materials, online, or in a presentation in front of a live audience helps create an emotional connection with potential customers.
- Add faces. Your presentations probably contain plenty of text, charts, and data. It's time to add some photos of faces so that your audience gets a visual cue when you talk about how your product, service, or company improves people's lives. Ideally, use professional photos of real customers. But at the very least, buy stock photographs and avoid the cheesy images that come standard with PowerPoint.
- Create hypothetical scenarios so your audience can imagine themselves using your product. Advertisers in the banking field have known this for some time. Most ads and Web sites for retirement services show faces of a satisfied man, woman, or couple who are secure in their knowledge that they have enough money to meet their needs, all thanks to the company's products. Just as we introduced the new CT scan with faces of our two patients, find a way to create story lines that leave your audience with a clear idea of how your product might benefit them. You might want to start with the example to give your audience the overview of what it does, followed by specifics. These scenarios are best introduced in presentations and on your company's Web site.
Remember, the image of a human face can make a powerful impact. Keep this in mind, and try to use the tips I describe above to forge a connection with your audience during your next presentation. Good luck!
Vadlo is a new search engine that's different in two ways:
- Vadlo is geared towards the vertical market -- and it only searches content related to biology research related information.
- Vadlo doesn't really look at just pages -- it indexes five categories of documentation -- these are Protocols, Online Tools, PowerPoints, Databases, and Software
I found their PowerPoint search quite amazing -- and asked the folks at Vadlo about their new search engine. While the Vadlo user-base is growing rapidly, the team at Vadlo is focused on developing the content. Here's a statement that the Vadlo Scientists sent to me to put up on the MedicinePPT site:
"We believe PowerPoint presentations are very useful tools -- more than they are recognized as such. A teacher preparing a lecture, an executive preparing for a business meeting, a clinician reporting a case study, or a scientist preparing for the departmental seminar can get a lot of angles on the subject matter by quickly looking at similar presentations and refine her/his own accordingly.
"The Vadlo index is built on the PowerPoints which have relevance to the following, everything else is filtered out.
- Biology Research - Organisms, Genes, Pathways, Mechanisms etc.
- Academia - Grants & Funding, Publication, Interviewing etc.
- Bioinformatics - Statistics, Software, Methods etc.
- Biology Education - College level Biology lectures, Biodiversity, Environment etc.
- Medical/Clinical - Diseases, Conditions, Case Studies, Intervention, Drugs etc.
- Library - Journals, Open-access, Peer-review, Literature databases etc.
- Biotech/Pharma Business - Technology transfer, Patents, Products, Clusters etc.
The Vadlo site also has a cool collection of medical cartoons that you can use in your PowerPoints freely.
Labels: medicine, powerpoint, vadlo
Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P is president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC and a paramedic, educator, author, and outdoor enthusiast. To learn more and to receive rapid e-learning design and production tips subscribe to the EPS blog at their site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC, and the training programs you create.
Greg: I am the founder and president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC. EPS does four things:
- We create narrated multimedia Flash movies for emergency responders.
- We convert existing classroom training for online delivery.
- We design and deliver new lessons and curriculum for online delivery that honor student's knowledge, experience, and time.
- We teach our proven rapid e-learning for emergency responders production process to educators and training officers.
Geetesh: Why do you use PowerPoint as the starting point for the creation of these programs? And what else do you use to enhance and distribute these programs.
Greg: We use PowerPoint for several reasons. First of all it is an excellent tool for us to storyboard a lesson. During initial production, each slide is given a working title and the script for the audio narration is written in the notes view. As production and editing progresses, notes for images, objects, and animations are added to the notes view. Once the script is finalized, slide production begins which includes a descriptive slide title and sub-title, insertion of images and objects, and animation formatting.
The final step is to convert the PowerPoint slides to Flash using Articulate Presenter. The audio is inserted and synchronized with the PowerPoint slide animations. The end user watches a narrated Flash movie inside the Articulate Presenter player. They may not even be aware that they are watching a movie that was created with PowerPoint.
We also use another Articulate product called Engage to create and insert custom Flash learning objects into the PowerPoint. The Articulate Engage Interactions publish inside the Articulate Presenter movie.
Labels: articulate, medicine, online_presentations, powerpoint, training
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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.