Project:A visual approach to the UMLS in Alzheimers education.

The primary outcome of this project was to visually connect neurological terms and ideas, functioning similarly to the way the current Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) alread does.

This was a large-team project, that was later broken down into smaller teams to produce different results. There were ??? main steps to this project:

Step 1:Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Research
The National Library of Medicine created the UMLS "to facilitate the development of computer systems that behave as if they "understand" the meaning of the language of biomedicine and health." In short: there are a lot of medical terms out there, all of which have very important and specific meanings. Each of these terms somehow relate or don't relate to eachother, but the ones that relate help further knowledge. To do this the UMLS is comprised of 3 main components: The Metathesaurus, Semantic Network and SPECIALIST Lexicon

Step 2: Alzheimer's Research
Because of the number of people involved in the research of this project (24), we split our terms for definition equally amongst all, and then gave presentations to each other on our selected words. Our terms generally covered Alzheimer's disease and the related processes and elements which seem to be associated with the disease based on the views of the scientific community and the UMLS. My words included: Plaque (in the brain) and Long-Term Potentiation (LTP).

When we felt we had a solid understanding of our terms as a whole, we met with neuroscientist Keith A. Crutcher, PhD. to help us further understand Alzheimer's Disease and the UMLS' way of helping scientists and biologists collaborate their findings and ideas, in hopes of soon finding a cure for the disease.

Step 3:Icon Generation
After individually defining our terms, we set out to create icons that represented our terms.

Step 4: Icon Series
In small groups, we used others' icons to generate a set of our own, all fitting our established style. Color is used sparingly to seperate icons into types.

Step 5: Using Verbs to Connect Concepts
After much ideation, we decided on using our verbs as connecting lines, instead of creating another set of icons to explain the verb relationships. Some verbs are animated because of the way they relate other ideas.

Step 6: Interface Design
Our interface was composed of our icons in large groups. When the user clicks the desired icon, the interface zooms in, blurring and minimizing unrelated topics, and connecting related topics via with verbs.

Other than my personal set of icons, I worked on the final product directly and specifically with Stephan Dixon and Matt Beharry