Advancing Medical Illustration in Patient Education Materials: from Art to Science

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Advancing Medical Illustration in Patient Education Materials: from Art to Science Despite the enormous effort and expense spent in the creation of medical illustrations, there has been no systematic empirical evaluation to date of the impact of varying illustration elements and styles on patient comprehension of the concepts that were intended to be conveyed in the illustration or patient anxiety induced by the illustration. In this effort we will first develop a domain ontology that systematically describes the space of medical illustration styles in current use. We will then use this ontology to guide the creation of a public domain corpus of patient education documents that exhibit the most important illustration distinctions identified in the ontology, along with knowledge tests for each. This corpus will be used to conduct an evaluation involving 8,100 individuals to assess the impact of different illustration styles on comprehension and anxiety. Finally, we will explore the use of Embodied Conversational Agents that simulate face-to-face conversation with a health provider, to explain patient education documents, both on 2D displays and in immersive Virtual Reality, evaluated in a randomized study involving 300 participants.