Osirix Imaging - Articles, Tutorials & Resources for Medical Illustrators

Blood Supply to the Brain, ©2006 John M. Daugherty
Pencil and Photoshop

The illustration is part of a larger illustration poster project directed to healthcare professionals with UA/INSTEMI patients at risk for atherosclerosis and atherothrombotic disorders.

I believe I first stumbled across OsiriX on the web in ‘04 or ‘05 not long after it first came out. I didn’t do much with it until a year or so later when I attended a demonstration of OsiriX at RSNA in Chicago. After learning a little about OsiriX’s 3D visualization tools, and having access to a few datasets, I recognized that I could use the program as a resource for non-standard views of human anatomy.

OsiriX proved to be helpful for this assignment, since I needed to represent the schema of the carotid arteries from a somewhat inferior, anterolateral view. Minor manipulations of the color lookup table in the 3D viewer allowed good visualization of the arteries. Accurately posing the arteries to match the view of my brain sketch (done from a 3D Somso model) was perhaps the most challenging task.

John Daugherty is the owner of Highlight Studios in Waukegan, Illinois and an internationally recognized medical illustrator. He is also currently Associate Program Director for the Biomedical Visualization Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Specializing in anatomical and diagnostic illustrations of the human body for the purpose of educating patients and healthcare professionals, John is sought after by clients who appreciate aesthetic compositions that tell the medical story. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for this illustration work in medical education and healthcare marketing, including at least twenty Association of Medical Illustrators salon awards.

OsiriX reference, FELIX dataset