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]
Some of his most notable publications include FromConception 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.
Early life and career
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.
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 1972.[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.
1980s
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.
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.
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.”
1990s
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.
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”.
Tsiaras has fused his experience in art, science, technology, journalism, and storytelling to develop groundbreaking medical tech companies.
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.”
StoryMD
In 2017, Tsiaras launched a new personalized health platform, StoryMD. This single, unified platform translates user health and wellness data into a visually rich story, allowing users to understand, track, share, and act on the trajectory of their well-being. Using unparalleled visualizations and a library of authoritative health information, StoryMD empowers users to actively understand and manage their health at each stage of the journey.
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]
Augmenting this library is a multimedia trove encompassing over 50,000 videos and 75,000 images and interactive tools that detail scientific intricacies in painstaking visual detail.[5]
Emulating Tsiaras’ multidisciplinary background, the StoryMD team marries artist and logician under one umbrella. The collection of scientists, mathematicians, visual designers, programmers, writers, and editors synthesize their work to capture both the aesthetic and technical splendor of medical science.
HealthJournals and the user experience
StoryMD bridges the divide between the complexities of medical science and the lay public by using an engaging multimedia format that incorporates information written in digestible language.
The platform organizes health topics into over 3,500 HealthJournals, each containing vividly 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]
The user experience can be further customized through tools that allow users to collect, group, and share the HealthJournals that are most relevant or interesting to them, thereby creating personal collections of the best information and most powerful visuals available. StoryMD Author, a visual editing application, gives users access to the StoryMD visual library to create and share their own HealthJournals.
“StoryMD will revolutionize how we take control of our own health story,” said Tsiaras. “So many of us are seeking factual health information that directly relates to our lives and circumstances.
“Until now, that information had to be cobbled together from different, sometimes unauthenticated sources. StoryMD puts vetted health information directly into the hands of anyone who wants it, enlivens it with our extraordinary visualizations of the human body and its conditions, and allows users to customize their experience based on their situation or interests,” he continued.
“It's the single place where, from conception to advanced age, your personal health and wellness data will live alongside relevant health insights and opportunities for engagement and community-building, empowering you to truly understand and actively manage your health.”
GENESIS suite
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]
GENESIS encapsulates the entire journey of reproduction, from in vitro fertilization to interpreting genetic testing information, through birth, and continuing into toddlerhood and early development.
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, 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 surgical subspecialty within medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of eye disorders.
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated 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. This experience is seamlessly interwoven with the physical world such that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of the real environment. In this way, augmented reality alters one's ongoing perception of a real-world environment, whereas virtual reality completely replaces the user's real-world environment with a simulated one.
Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic health records, diagnostic test results, medical scans. The health domain provides an extremely wide variety of problems that can be tackled using computational techniques.
Visualization or visualisation 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. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.
WebMD is an American corporation known primarily as an online publisher of news and information pertaining to human health and well-being. The site includes information pertaining to drugs. It is one of the top healthcare websites.
Bernhard Preim is a specialist in human–computer interface design as well as in visual computing for medicine. He is currently professor of visualization at University of Magdeburg, Germany.
A medical illustration is a form of biological illustration that helps to record and disseminate medical, anatomical, and related knowledge.
Health technology is defined by the World Health Organization as the "application of organized knowledge and skills in the form of devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures, and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of lives". This includes pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and organizational systems used in the healthcare industry, as well as computer-supported information systems. In the United States, these technologies involve standardized physical objects, as well as traditional and designed social means and methods to treat or care for patients.
Data and information visualization is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is numerous as for example a time series.
Virtual reality in telerehabilitation is a method used first in the training of musculoskeletal patients using asynchronous patient data uploading, and an internet video link. Subsequently, therapists using virtual reality-based telerehabilitation prescribe exercise routines via the web which are then accessed and executed by patients through a web browser. Therapists then monitor the patient's progress via the web and modify the therapy asynchronously without real-time interaction or training.
The Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM), located on the Health Science Campus of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, is one of 7 schools of medicine in Pennsylvania conferring the M.D. degree. It also confers the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in biomedical sciences. In addition, LKSOM offers a Narrative Medicine Program.
Jock D. Mackinlay is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques.
GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.
GeoTime is geospatial analysis software that allows the visual analysis of events over time. It adds time as the third dimension to a two-dimensional map, allowing users to see changes within time series data. Users can view real-time animated playback of data and use automated analysis tools within the software to identify location patterns, connections between events, and trends.
A medical animation is a short educational film, usually based around a physiological or surgical topic, that is rendered using 3D computer graphics. While it may be intended for an array of audiences, the medical animation is most commonly utilized as an instructional tool for medical professionals or their patients.
The Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) was created in 1994 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 restored sight to over one million people since year since 1994.
BioDigital is a New York-based biomedical visualization company that is often referred to as being "Google Earth for the Human Body". BioDigital offers an interactive, 3D software platform that enables individuals and businesses to explore and visualize health information. Their flagship product, the BioDigital Human, is a "searchable, customizable map of the human body".
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.
The Visible Embryo Project (VEP) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research project originally created in the early 1990s as a collaboration between the Developmental Anatomy Center at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Biomedical Visualization Laboratory (BVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "to develop software strategies for the development of distributed biostructural databases using cutting-edge technologies for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC), and to implement these tools in the creation of a large-scale digital archive of multidimensional data on normal and abnormal human development." This project related to BVL's other research in the areas of health informatics, educational multimedia, and biomedical imaging science. Over the following decades, the list of VEP collaborators grew to include over a dozen universities, national laboratories, and companies around the world.
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