As of right now, I am very interested in pursuing Medical Illustration as a career path and am looking into the available graduate programs around North America. One of the most prestigious programs is Johns Hopkins Art as Applied to Medicine graduate program right here in Baltimore. I was presented this opportunity by my mom who is an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins. Juan Garcia is an Anaplastologist, Associate professor in the Art as Applied to Medicine, Director of the Facial Prosthetics Clinic and manager of the 3D printing lab in the Carnegie Center.
Mr. Garcia works primarily with patients that are in need of a facial prosthetic, he uses a combination of 3D scanning of the patients face, 3D digital Modeling in programs like ZBrush and then 3D printing over in the Carnegie Center. As his assistant I first worked on cataloging the instruments into an excel spreadsheet that he used in the sculpting of the wax prosthetics and the 3D printed copies. The cataloging was in an effort to keep track of all the instruments he used and had to send in for sterilization. The next Big assignment tasked to me was scanning in old casts and molds of noses and ears with a program called Artec studios. After scanning the pieces in, I would transfer them over to the 3D sculpting program called Zbrush. In that program I learned how to tidy up the cast scans and then fit them to a certain orientation. This was Project was completed in order for Mr. Garcia to easily access his past casts and fit them to a current patient in need of said facial feature. I would like to say that one of the things I'm most proud of was being able to learn and adapt to using a system as complicated as ZBrush.
A big takeaway from this internship is a fuller and more in depth look at how art can advance medicine and the possible avenues that i can explore coming out of MICA. This experience definitely helped to clarify what is needed in order to pursue a career like this.
