|
|
Alum part of team that gets under skin with CD teaching tool |
| By
Cynthia Nowak |
|
|
Aug 2, 2006 |
|
He shares his office with skeletons in various stages of dishabille, and with an in-progress model of a human sphincter — but it’s all part of the job for 1981 UT graduate Roy Schneider, manager of medical illustration at the Medical University of Ohio.
 |
| Inking his way around the small bowel, Roy Schneider gets graphic with pancreatic cancer. |
His body of work? Everything from the skin on down, he says: “I work with the faculty on medical research papers, on textbooks they’re having published, on patient procedures for operations. They all need medical illustrations.”
Interested in art “since forever,” Schneider has been with MUO for more than 20 years. Until recently, most of his medical oeuvre was created using computer mouse or stylus, but improved computer technologies changed that, he says. “Rather than drawing a femur over and over, I used a computer to capture one drawing. Then I added layers of muscle and skin that could be manipulated.”
The new capabilities were just what the doctor ordered when MUO came to Schneider’s division with a request: design an innovative way to teach basic anatomy. The result — sparked by Schneider’s idea, developed by a team of MUO anatomists and multimedia specialists — was Anatomy & Physiology Revealed, a multimedia computer program on four CDs that’s already become a front-runner in the McGraw-Hill publishing stable, winning their 2005 Corporate Achievement Award, the company’s highest honor for a project. Thanks to the MUO teamwork, the series was also a finalist for a Codie Award, a coveted distinction honoring vision and excellence in the software and information industries.
Anatomy & Physiology Revealed, which literally peels away the mysteries of the human body, began with actual cadaver dissections photographed in MUO’s morgue. “The photos are cleaned up using PhotoShop, and we enhance certain parts of the anatomy if need be,” Schneider says. Choosing a region of the body, students use program controls to melt away the skin, revealing the underlying muscular, nervous and skeletal systems. “For the sake of realism, we didn’t want to base it on the perfect body, either,” Schneider adds. “We wanted a little bit of everything.”
The program has self-testing built in, and the voice feature even provides the correct pronunciation of terms like “latissimus dorsi.”
Were Schneider’s own life an interactive computer program, it might be designed along the lines of “American Idol”; a one-time display of his art outside an operating room launched his career. Working at the then-Medical College of Ohio as an orderly, he took advantage of a moment’s down time to sketch a comic-book-type artery on the chalkboard surgeons use to demonstrate medical procedures. When it was found by returning physicians, “I thought I was toast,” he says. Instead, one of the surgeons asked if he’d be interested in illustrating a medical textbook.
For Schneider, who was half-heartedly enrolled in UT art classes and wondering if they would ever lead to that real job, it was a life-changing moment. “Dr. Tom Martin told me to look into medical illustration as a career. Only five universities offered a degree in that field, and the closest was the University of Michigan. Little did I know that they accept only four students a year out of 1,800 applicants!
“I was still an orderly, still picking up illustration work, still working my butt off on my UT degree. I did flextime at MCO — weekends, holidays. By my junior year, I became a full-time student. I applied to Michigan — and got in.”
In time, MCO created a position for him, and the rest is history. And physiology. And anatomy. Do the more graphic graphics of his job faze him? Schneider, who with his business partner Dr. Dennis Morse recently funded a frog anatomy teaching program for kids, doesn’t hesitate: “If you have a weak stomach you wouldn’t be in this business, but at the same time there’s a chance to learn what takes place inside people.
“No, I’m never grossed out — and I’m never bored!”
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
