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Alexander Tsiaras is an American photographer, entrepreneur, technology innovator, and journalist whose work has appeared on the cover of over 150 magazines. He is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of TheVisualMD and StoryMD. [1]
Tsiaras’ awards include the World Press Photo of the Year, Webby Award, and the Satava Award for his work on improving medicine through advanced technology, and his work has been featured on the covers of Time , the New York Times Magazine , Smithsonian, Life magazine, and the London Sunday Times Magazine . [1]
Tsiaras has lectured and keynoted conferences, including the National Library of Medicine (NLM/NIH) Scientific Visualization Conference, TED, TEDMED, Ink Conference (in association with TED India), Google Health Conference "ThinkHealth 2012", and Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR). He lectured with Stephen Hawking at the MIT Media Lab. [2]
Some of his most notable publications include From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, Architecture and Design of Man and Woman, and the InVision Guides to Healthy Heart, Sexual Health and Life Blood. His latest releases include Conception to Birth and TheVisualMD Wellness Program, A Scientific Approach to Losing Weight, Preventing Illness and Reversing Chronic Diseases.
The son of Greek immigrants who emigrated via Ellis Island to the US after the conclusion of the Second World War, Tsiaras was raised on the stories of his parents’ homeland. His father would seasonally bring the goats south from Northern Macedonia to a small village near Mount Olympus where he met Tsiaras’ mother.[ citation needed ]
At the age of 19, Tsiaras travelled to his parents' villages in rural Greece to spend a year herding goats. It was here that he was exposed to the extraordinary centuries-old funeral and exhumation rituals that inspired him to record the local practices and independently kickstart his journalism career. Tsiaras co-authored his first book, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton University Press), in 1982. [3] "Greeks don’t celebrate life, they celebrate death," according to Tsiaras. "We don’t celebrate birthdays, we celebrate name days, based on the deaths of saints. In these remote Greek villages, they believe that the soul's transcendence to heaven is directly related to the decomposition of the flesh: the more flesh on the bones exposed at the time of the exhumation, the more sins; the less flesh, the less sins," he added.[ citation needed ]
In the early 1980s, Tsiaras’ work in Greece attracted the attention of the German/US monthly magazine, Geo, who assigned him to travel to his parents' villages to document them through photography. These works, “My Father’s Greece”, were published in Geo in 1982. Geo later collaborated with Tsiaras to help them launch as an international presence using his visual prowess.[ citation needed ]
After his work abroad, Tsiaras returned to the United States and studied painting and sculpting with the well-known artist Lucas Samaras and sculptor George Segal, but it was the drama of medical intervention that gripped him most. Photographing and documenting the marvel of surgical operations became a point of increasing focus.[ citation needed ]
Tsiaras’ next move was to teach himself mathematics and physics, and he used this knowledge to start developing his own lenses, including one for a microscope that was used to photograph the first images of human eggs in an in vitro fertilization program. Another lens, designed for use with an endoscope, is capable of photographing a fetus from outside the amniotic sac. Images developed using this lens became cover stories for Life Magazine. [1]
In 1989, Tsiaras realized the potential of computer-generated imagery and learned UNIX, then C and C++ to write his own programs that transferred his knowledge of light moving through physical space to light moving through tissue in virtual space. [1]
Tsiaras formed part of an innovative team that designed 3D imaging technologies capable of analyzing the density of tissues, the results of which could then be extrapolated and segmented to perform surgical operations in advance. They received grants from major groups such as Intel and Apple to further their technology. "Before this software, [surgeons] would sometimes have to perform the operation maybe four times in order to get it right," said Tsiaras. "But this way, you can do the measurements in advance and achieve it in one go".[ citation needed ]
By the 1990s, Tsiaras’ work had gotten him noticed by many media groups, which led to appearances and contributions to various books, magazine covers, and CD-ROMs. One publication of Life magazine dedicated the entire issue to Tsiaras’ visualization of the human body, which was unprecedented for the magazine since they had never before focused on only a single contributor for an issue.[ citation needed ]
Despite having never formally completed any higher-level education, he was approached by Yale School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, with an offer to become an adjunct professor. Working with Yale, he received funding from NASA to write algorithms for virtual surgery so that astronauts could be surgically treated in robotics pods during deep space flights. As Tsiaras explained, "…if you’re on your way to Mars and when passing by the moon you get an appendicitis attack, you’re going to have to be cut".[ citation needed ]
Beginning in 1988 as Anatomical Travelogue, Tsiaras remolded the company into the more user-friendly TheVisualMD in 1997. A media and technology company based in New York, TheVisualMD was dedicated to writing advanced software that scans the body from the molecular to the larger anatomies, from conception to advanced age. [4] Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Conferences, described TheVisualMD as "…the perfect marriage of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Pixar."[ citation needed ]
In 2017, Tsiaras launched a new personalized health platform, StoryMD. This single, unified platform translates user health and wellness data into visualizations, allowing users to understand, track, and share health details.[ citation needed ]
StoryMD has collated one of the world’s most complete digital repositories of medical knowledge. The encyclopedic domain boasts over 5,000 health and wellness topics and 35,000 articles, delivered in a highly accessible format that emphasizes relevance to the user. All the information therein has been vetted by authoritative and reliable open sources including the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. [5] [ better source needed ]
Augmenting this library is a multimedia trove encompassing over 50,000 videos and 75,000 images and interactive tools that detail scientific intricacies. [5] [ better source needed ]
StoryMD bridges the divide between the complexities of medical science and the lay public by using a multimedia format that incorporates information written in digestible language.
The platform organizes health topics into over 3,500 HealthJournals, each containing illustrated, information-rich stories on a litany of topics related to conditions, pathologies, treatments, anatomy, and nutrition. There are also HealthJournals covering prevention, insights into interactive biomarkers of risk and strategies to stave off disease, and user-friendly information on a wide range of medications. [5] [ better source needed ]
A cornerstone of StoryMD’s offerings is the GENESIS suite, a 300+ HealthJournal collection that provides prospective, expectant, and new parents a better way to understand and manage every aspect of fertility and pregnancy. [5] .
Tsiaras lives with his wife, son, and dog Kookla in New York City and in rural Pennsylvania.[ citation needed ]
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for patients, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness. Contemporary medicine applies biomedical sciences, biomedical research, genetics, and medical technology to diagnose, treat, and prevent injury and disease, typically through pharmaceuticals or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints and traction, medical devices, biologics, and ionizing radiation, amongst others.
Ophthalmology is a clinical and surgical specialty within medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of eye disorders. A former term is oculism.
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated 3D content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects. The overlaid sensory information can be constructive, or destructive. As such, it is one of the key technologies in the reality-virtuality continuum.
Far-sightedness, also known as long-sightedness, hypermetropia, and hyperopia, is a condition of the eye where distant objects are seen clearly but near objects appear blurred. This blur is due to incoming light being focused behind, instead of on, the retina due to insufficient accommodation by the lens. Minor hypermetropia in young patients is usually corrected by their accommodation, without any defects in vision. But, due to this accommodative effort for distant vision, people may complain of eye strain during prolonged reading. If the hypermetropia is high, there will be defective vision for both distance and near. People may also experience accommodative dysfunction, binocular dysfunction, amblyopia, and strabismus. Newborns are almost invariably hypermetropic, but it gradually decreases as the newborn gets older.
Computer-mediated reality refers to the ability to add to, subtract information from, or otherwise manipulate one's perception of reality through the use of a wearable computer or hand-held device such as a smartphone.
Visualization, also known as Graphics Visualization, is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering purposes that actively involve scientific requirements.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Vision science is the scientific study of visual perception. Researchers in vision science can be called vision scientists, especially if their research spans some of the science's many disciplines.
Geovisualization or geovisualisation, also known as cartographic visualization, refers to a set of tools and techniques supporting the analysis of geospatial data through the use of interactive visualization.
Data and information visualization is the practice of designing and creating easy-to-communicate and easy-to-understand graphic or visual representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and information with the help of static, dynamic or interactive visual items. Typically based on data and information collected from a certain domain of expertise, these visualizations are intended for a broader audience to help them visually explore and discover, quickly understand, interpret and gain important insights into otherwise difficult-to-identify structures, relationships, correlations, local and global patterns, trends, variations, constancy, clusters, outliers and unusual groupings within data. When intended for the general public to convey a concise version of known, specific information in a clear and engaging manner, it is typically called information graphics.
An eye care professional is an individual who provides a service related to the eyes or vision. It is any healthcare worker involved in eye care, from one with a small amount of post-secondary training to practitioners with a doctoral level of education.
Digital Earth is the name given to a concept by former US vice president Al Gore in 1998, describing a virtual representation of the Earth that is georeferenced and connected to the world's digital knowledge archives.
In virtual reality (VR), immersion is the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system in images, sound or other stimuli that provide an engrossing total environment.
Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary science and technology field that emerged from information visualization and scientific visualization. It focuses on how analytical reasoning can be facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.
Sharecare, Inc. is an Atlanta, Georgia-based health and wellness company that provides consumers with personalized health-related information, programs, and resources. It provides personalized information to the site's users based on their responses to the RealAge Test, the company's health risk assessment tool, and offers a clinical decision support tool, AskMD. Headquartered in Atlanta, Sharecare was founded in 2010 by Jeff Arnold and Dr. Mehmet Oz, in partnership with Remark Media, Harpo Studios, Sony Pictures Television and Discovery Communications.
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The Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) was created in 1995 by Dr. Geoffrey Tabin and Dr. Sanduk Ruit with a goal of establishing a sustainable eye care infrastructure in the Himalaya. HCP empowers local doctors to provide ophthalmic care through skills-transfer and education. From its beginning, HCP responds to a pressing need for eye care in the Himalayan region. With programs in Nepal, Ethiopia, Ghana, Bhutan and India they have been able to restore sight to over 1.4 million people since 1995.
Microsoft HoloLens is an augmented reality (AR)/mixed reality (MR) headset developed and manufactured by Microsoft. HoloLens runs the Windows Mixed Reality platform under the Windows 10 operating system. Some of the positional tracking technology used in HoloLens can trace its lineage to the Microsoft Kinect, an accessory for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox One game consoles that was introduced in 2010.
Ron Kikinis is an American physician and scientist best known for his research in the fields of imaging informatics, image guided surgery, and medical image computing. He is a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Kikinis is the founding director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the vice-chair for Biomedical Informatics Research in the Department of Radiology.