Being Mike Boasso

By Tom Savonick, Senior Medical Writer

If you visit our headquarters in Flemington, NJ, be sure to sign up for the guided tour of Mike Boasso’s brain. Mike, Director of Medical Illustration at Artcraft Health Education, has one of the more interesting brains you’ll ever enter.

Enter most brains, and you’ll find one side of the brain doing most of the heavy lifting. In the brains of musicians, artists, and poets, the right side of the brain turns emotions into rhymes and colors while the left side putters. In the brains of mathematicians, programmers, and surgeons, the left side logically analyzes, 24/7, while the right side dabbles.

Ah, but enter the brain of Mike Boasso and there is equality. Left side and right side sharing the burden as one, teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. Truth be told, you could enter the brain of any medical illustrator at Artcraft—Doug Walp, Brandon Keehner, or Jamie Rippke—and you’d see that same shared division of labor between creativity and analysis. It’s the nature of the beast for medical illustrators.

A medical illustrator is a professional artist with an advanced education in the life sciences. Medical illustrators must understand the human body at the same level of detail as a doctor or nurse. And, they must be able to artistically render any part of the body in perfect detail to help people understand how it works, or why it isn’t working very well. It’s not a profession for the dilettante.

Medical illustrators train both sides of their brains heavily. The left side absorbs courses in anatomy, pathology, microanatomy, physiology, embryology, and neuroanatomy. The right side develops artistic technique through color theory, instructional design, photography, interactive media development, 3D modeling, Web design, and surgical illustration. The surgical illustration class is likely to include hands-on cadaver dissection, which you may want to consider before quitting your day job.

Medical illustration is still a small field, with fewer than 2,000 trained practitioners worldwide. But demand is growing, driven largely by advances in computer graphics, animation, and imaging. A few years ago, a medical illustrator’s work was most likely to be seen on a poster hanging in a doctor’s exam room, with the title Understanding Your Kidney. Today, medical illustrators are delving into cellular and even subcellular processes. A current 3D animation might be titled Inside the Proximal Tubule. Medical illustrations can even help scientists and laypeople visualize anatomical details and processes far too small to be seen with anything short of an electron microscope.

So, what can the medical illustrators at Artcraft Health Education do for you? That’s a whole ‘nuther subject that I’ll be posting about here in a few weeks. Check this space for the next exciting episode.

The Association of Medical Illustrators Annual Meeting

 

          
Samantha Reba
Junior Writer

The 68th Annual Meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) took place July 17-21 in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the premier conference on medical and scientific visualization, the annual AMI meeting brings together a diverse array of professionals engaged in promoting the power of visual media to advance understanding of the life sciences. Two of our esteemed medical illustrators, Mike Boasso and Satyen Tripathi, were able to travel out to the city to attend 4 days of the conference.

Among other things, this year’s conference, entitled “FUSION: Connecting Minds, Visualizing Science & Medicine,” consisted of daily workshops led by a host of highly regarded professionals. Satyen had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop led by Chris Converse, a multimedia designer and developer from the Philadelphia area.  Chris has been a featured speaker at HOW Design, AIGA, and Adobe MAX conferences, and has written and hosted a variety of training videos. The subject of the workshop that Satyen attended was Adobe Edge Animate, which is the newest addition to the Adobe family. The program combines Adobe and web standards with rich features that allow the user to design and animate every interactive experience.

Mike, who’s been attending AMI Annual Meetings for a decade, was able to grab a seat in the ZBrush® for Beginners workshop led by Wes Price, an associate professor of media arts and animation at the Art Institute of Colorado. Mr. Price’s workshop discussed the importance of ZBrush®, the prominent program that’s become a very powerful and useful tool in the field of biomedical visualization.

In addition to the workshops, a salon was created to showcase medical illustrations from across the country. The artwork remained on display for the entirety of the conference.

More than 300 professionals turned out for the meeting. Speakers included: Roberta Ness, MD, MPH, Dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health; Jens Krüger, PhD , Chair of the High Performance Computing Graphics & Visualization group at the University of Duisburg-Essen; Frederic Hellman, MD, Delaware County Medical Examiner; Peleg Top, Marketing Strategist; Carlos Machado, MD, Physician/Illustrator at Ciba-Geigy/Novartis; and Carl Zimmer, Author.

The 69th Annual Meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators will take place July 23-26, 2014 in Rochester, MN. Mike and Satyen are already looking forward to attending.