PowerPoint and Medicine, Design in Samsung Medical Center, Korea: Conversation with Sang-Eun Lee

Thursday, March 25, 2010

posted by Geetesh at 12:07 PM IST

Sang-Eun Lee graduated with Master of Arts from the School of Arts in Korea, and works in the areas of medical illustration and photography for the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. She is a PowerPoint power user who uses a variety of advanced features for creation of Samsung Medical Center Template Designs, Q&A slides, and other stuff. Her projects are used by doctors for oral presentations or posters at symposiums, scientific lectures, learning books, and theses. Her activities in the hospital have been considered very valuable and important to over 7000 staff personnel, including doctors. She has been awarded as a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) since 2009.

Geetesh: Tell us a little about your work using PowerPoint in the medicine sector.

Sang-Eun Lee: I create engaging and attractive slide decks with my medical knowledge from experiences in the hospital. The results are considered good enough to be used at external seminars and internal staff meetings. Many colleagues and faculty members (doctors) show strong interests in my lectures during the community seminars and have requested me frequently to help out with their work.

I use combination of PowerPoint and other applications to create digital illustration projects. I do use professional illustration software as well but have found that by using PowerPoint, I can quickly and easily help communicate accurate information during doctor’s visits.

Let me share this project which shows my workflow of creating medical illustration using PowerPoint.

The medical staff brought me a video of a procedure that needs to be translated into illustrations. The illustrations are to be included in a video that will be submitted to a spring seminar in ophthalmology. As I watch the video, I save out the parts that I need to illustrate (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Saved pictures collected from a video clip
I then sketch a simple thumbnails on paper to get a feedback from medical staff to ascertain that I have got the accuracy, and areas that need to highlighted right (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Preliminary sketches
Finally, I draw this content using PowerPoint's drawing tools, referencing both sketch and video often in the process. Once this goes through an editing process, it can be used for slide show with animation if required to maximize the visual content we already have as a presentation (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Sequenced visual content

Geetesh: What’s different in the way that the folks in the medicine industry use PowerPoint, compared to how the business people use it?

Sang-Eun Lee: Both business people, and the medical industry share the commonality that they both use PowerPoint as a visual tool for creating presentations such as visual-heavy report materials, effective multimedia enabled materials, various drafts for internal and external use, etc.

However, using PowerPoint graphic tools to create mimetic diagrams and drawings of up-to-date medical information that the medical staff includes in their journals and presentations has been appraised as a new application of PowerPoint by audiences from around the world. This was obvious during this year's Microsoft MVP Global Summit’s MVP presentations.

Labels: interview, medicine, powerpoint

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