Medicine PowerPoint: April 2008

Blog on templates, themes, design, and usability for Medicine PowerPoint and presentation stuff.

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Motifolio: New Resource for Biomedical Clip Art

Monday, April 28, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 4:21 PM IST

Motifolio is a new site that provides a range of biomedical clip art -- these are available in topics like human and animal forms, cell, cell organelle, cell protein, nucleic acid, antibody, microorganism, labware, etc.

Motifolio - Biomedical Clip Art

Most of the stuff is very affordable -- and they also have some free samples that you can download. Go to the Motfolio site for more details and to explore their clip art collection.

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Sunday, April 13, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 4:58 PM IST

Echo Swinford (pictured to the right) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she's not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the co-author of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, published by Que. She also creates tons of presentations for the medical industry -- you can contact her for your presentation requirements through her site: Echo's Voice.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and the PowerPoint work you do in the medical industry.

Well, I started working for a medical education communications company in 1997. The owner was considering outsourcing her slide work, but she was worried about quality control. I knew my quality control was good in general, so I proposed that she let me create her slides. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t really know PowerPoint, so when she agreed, I had to learn it – and learn it fast!

I think my background in journalism and desktop publishing has really helped me with slide development, especially if you think of it as page layout on a large scale. I know that my proofreading skills are a definite plus, and the fact that I’m a bit of a math and puzzle geek sure hasn’t hurt!

Here I am, 11 years later, still developing presentations for a variety of industries. In the healthcare and medical education industry specifically, I do a lot of slide cleanup work, making presentations consistent and visible for conferences and meetings as well as developing collateral materials like scientific posters and syllabi. I also do a lot of promotional decks, speaker-led presentations, CME materials, and stand-alone enduring education modules that are distributed in a variety of ways. In addition, I can often be found with the production crew backstage at meetings, running speaker review or minding the presentation equipment. I love being self-employed, so I have the opportunity to do all of those things and more (like write PowerPoint books!).

Geetesh: What sets the presentations created for medicine to be different than conventional PowerPoints?

Echo: Honestly, I don’t know that there is such a thing as a “conventional” PowerPoint! PowerPoint is used in so many ways….

One thing common to many medical presentations, though, is the sheer amount of data-driven slides. That means lots of charts, lots of tables, and lots of really text-heavy slides. I find that the extreme mix of chart slides is always a challenge in medical presentations – more so than with what I see in other industries. For example, it’s not unusual for a medical presenter to want four or six very small charts on a slide, with the goal of comparing various studies or compounds at different stages. Therefore, understanding what point the speaker wants to make becomes imperative to the design of the slide. If you can eliminate or at least downplay the extraneous information, you can emphasize what’s important – what the audience should remember.

So, maybe after this four-chart slide, there’s a column chart. Then a line chart, then a pie chart, then a column chart with a trend line. Some have error bars, some don’t. Some slides have two or three or four charts, others have just one. The challenge is making all of these different charts look like a cohesive set, especially when the data varies so greatly. It’s also important to understand what types of charts show what types of data the best so you can advise your clients appropriately.

When you toss in text-heavy slides, it’s important for the presentation developer to understand what’s important and what can be moved into speaker notes or downplayed on the slide. Some text slides work better as tables, especially if the text has lots of numbers and specific data.

And then, of course, there’s always the struggle with where to place references, P-values, and acronym definitions, and it’s not unusual to have a lot of all of those on an individual slide! That extreme amount of “fine print” just isn’t as much of an issue in the presentations I work on for other industries. And finding some of the symbols used in medical presentations can be an adventure, too.

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Wednesday, April 9, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 1:34 PM IST

If you like looking at medicine art, you'll love this new exposition site that looks at all nuances of the human heart. Hosted on the Wellcome Collection site, which is a London based organization that brings to life the vision of Sir Henry Wellcome, this new heart exposition is a Flash montage of various small stories all related to the human heart.

Wellcome Collection -- The Heart

But remember, spare enough time to get lost in the montage!

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Saturday, April 5, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 3:17 PM IST

Aristotle at the LouvreThis is part of a continuous series of posts in which I will explore the fascinating relation between medicine and art. Most of these posts will contain plenty of links to resources with more info, and as far as possible, I'll try to include visual content as well.

We'll start by exploring a little known facet of Aristotle's personality -- it's not a very well known fact that Aristotle was a anatomist -- his philosophical attributes often overshadow his other capabilities.

Aristotle has been credited as being the first anatomist although none of his anatomical drawings and biological work has survived. He drew the distinction between nerves and tendons -- and explored the relations between organs quite accurately.

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Thursday, April 3, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 10:15 AM IST

Medical PowerPointOlivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.

Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.

Medical PowerPointOur idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.

We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.

At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.

We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)

Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.

Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.

Medical PowerPointThey are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.

More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.

Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.

Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. "You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!".

Note: This interview originally appeared on Indezine.com -- here's a link to the post...

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Wednesday, April 2, 2008
posted by Geetesh at 3:18 PM IST

Users in the field of medicine are among the largest users of PowerPoint as a medium of information, instruction, and distribution. These users however tend to use PowerPoint in a very different manner than conventional PowerPoint users -- they also need a different set of resources that is geared towards their profession. After years of running Indezine.com, one of the largest PowerPoint sites I realized that there really isn't a PowerPoint resource available that has been created exclusively for end users in the medicine sector. And thus MedicinePPT.com was born.

If you work with PowerPoint in the medicine sector, please do share this resource with your colleagues -- and do send me your feedback so that we can make this site better.

Thanks for visiting this site -- have a great day!

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