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What’s happening with the baby now? All expectant parents ask this question throughout the exhilirating months of pregnancy. Fuzzy sonograms and doctor’s explanations can provide basic information, but through the remarkable achievements in medical imaging technology made by Alexander Tsiaras, parents can see, for the first time, the awe-inspiring process of a new life unfolding, in stunning, vivid detail.
Tsiaras has made a video, “From Conception to Birth”, in which the milestones of pregnancy can now be witnessed: the heart’s first beats; the appearance of color in the eye; the emergence of toes and teeth; the brain and nervous system directing development; the first movement of tiny legs and arms; the first indications of gender; the wondrous symbiosis of mother and child; the symphony of the body’s systems coming into being and working in concert.
All this is made possible by revolutions in two sciences. As biologists have decoded the molecular basis of life, computer scientists have developed non-invasive, three-dimensional techniques for visualizing the body.
Alexander Tsiaras has been a pioneer in merging these explorations and discoveries. He has created a virtual camera studio that enables him to view a human body or any part of it individually, scan it, enlarge it, rotate it, adjust its transparency so that we can view inside a living being, and light it from any angle. The result is an ability to illuminate the unseen elements that make us who we are, and the miraculous images in “From Conception to Birth”.
“Even though I am a mathematician,”says Tsiaras, “I look at this with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us?”
“The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension,” he says.
Alexander Tsiaras is an artist and technologist whose work explores the unseen human body, developing scientific visualization software to enable him to “paint” the human anatomy using volume data. He’s the author of Body Voyage and co-author of Information Architects.
Image: Google.com
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