The Association of Medical Illustrators annual meeting was held this past month in Newton Massachusetts, and as usual, the Toronto contingent was out in force. Current 1st and 2nd year students in the program, as well as several profs and alum spanning several decades presented work in the Salon and engaging talks at the podiums.
The AMI meeting is a great place to reconvene with BMC Alumni from profs to students, professionals working in Toronto to those who have ventured out to different cities.
The first talk of the conference focused on the past, present and future of clinical trials by Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. The conference is a great place to learn about cutting edge research and innovations such as the “Organ-on-a-Chip” technology presented by Dr. Lian Leng of Emulate, Inc. and the ever-evolving Molecular Maya toolkit by Dr. Gaël McGill.
The power of social media was discussed in several talks, including Hannah Ahn’s CTisus facebook page presentation, Jeff Day’s “Anatomy of a YouTube post”, and Jennifer Fairman’s digital marketing strategies break-down. Talks like these are why the AMI is one of the best places to brush up on business knowledge, everything from metadata to licensing and copyright is covered.
Learn more about protecting your work at the AMI members HUB!
This year the meeting also featured a Business Panel Q&A, where Artery Studios' Stephen Mader (0T5) was there to share his knowledge of the Canadian perspective.
Professors Jodie Jenkinson and Michael Corrin presented the “CANVIS: Citation, Annotation & Visualization Integration System”. This application addressed the overlooked, critical need for more citations to be integrated into the imagery we create as biomedical communicators. It is important to know that competition will swoop in on this point, and use our lack of citations against us if we fail to adapt. Jodie and Michael made a strong argument for why this is a “win big / lose big” proposition. The benefits to embedding citations within our work include encouraging a systematic reference collection practice, making reference data use transparent to our clients, and supporting our dedication to scientific accuracy.
Several BMC Alum gave insightful and engaging presentations, including Kristin Browne (1T5) who presented “NLM3D: A Library of License-Free 3D-Anatomical Models Derived from Medical Imaging Data”, and Ruth Chang (1T7) whose talk “Show, Don’t Tell: Visual Strategies for Storytelling in Animation”, uncovered the narrative decision-making that went into her MRP, “Obesity & Health: Visualizing the Intersection Between Canada's Two Greatest Epidemics”.
Amanda Miller (1T8) gave the first of two Toronto Vesalian Scholar Talks, “Temporal Visualization of Body Cavity Partitioning: An Interactive Timeline”, while the second, was the talk by Nati Chen, Chelsea Canlas, and Patricia Nguyen (all 1T8) who presented on the first ever group MRP!: “Kinundrum: A Problem-based Multimedia Learning Application for Undergraduate Kinesiology Education”.
We are proud of all our recent alum who contributed their fascinating work and valuable insights to the annual meeting!
Paul Kelly, MScBMC 1T1, CMI
BMCAA Treasurer
IG: @keloskopy
Twitter: @pizawl
pkvisualization.com