Elsevier’s 3D Interactive Anatomy Tools Use Advanced Gaming Technology to Bring the Body to Life

For medical and health professions students, learning anatomy is a challenge. There are hundreds of terms and structures to learn as well as functions of the body and how they relate. Add to that the lack of time, lack of staff to teach anatomy and the lack of donated human bodies for dissection, and the picture becomes even more complicated.

Today’s medical students have grown up with advanced computer games, and they are used to games as educational tools. That’s why Elsevier has partnered with Cyber-Anatomy Inc., an Iowa-based company that creates interactive learning systems for medical students, to develop state-of-the-art software using advanced gaming technology for learning, reviewing, and teaching anatomy. Cyber-Anatomy approached Elsevier because the Netter brand, of which Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy is the leading product, was considered dominant in anatomy, and Elsevier saw the potential.

Elsevier and Cyber-Anatomy worked for two years to fine-tune the tool, usage and functions of the gaming environment. The collaboration involved bioengineers, anatomists and graphic artists. The result is a new line of interactive anatomy products, InteractElsevier, which give students and faculty more time and flexibility to master and teach anatomy. “It’s like having a cadaver at home,” said Eric Ojerholm, a second-year student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Caption: Video of InteractElsevier Series (click on the image to view).

How it works

The goal is to build the body as you want to learn. Starting with a blank slate, users construct the components of anatomy they want to study. For example, to learn the shoulder area, they load the bones, muscles, arteries and nerves to create the ”body.” Approaching the body by regions, such as upper limbs and lower limbs, or systems, such as skeletal, muscular or circulatory, the user can peel, hide, label and make structures transparent, and rotate the body freely using the interactive buttons to deploy the tools.

The products

• Netter’s 3D Interactive Anatomy incorporates the famous medical illustrations of the late Dr. Frank H Netter. The web version includes a feature to place the Netter’s Atlas plates in the 3D model, bringing context to the familiar images.
• Elsevier’s 3D Interactive Anatomy is not based on any one atlas, but it incorporates the Gray’s Anatomy plates in a similar way to the Netter version.

Both come in web and virtual-reality formats. The web versions allow students to use the software outside the classroom. The virtual-reality systems are classroom-based tools for visualizing the human body in true 3D. The products are in final stages of beta testing.

For more information visit: www.interactelsevier.com.

PharmaPendium is Reducing Research Time from Weeks to Hours

According to a leading dermatology company, PharmaPendium has eliminated the need for months of essential research each year. In the words of the company's scientific information manager: "We probably access PharmaPendium between 60 and 80 times a month to compare products that are currently in development and at the lifecycle management stage."

The database gives drug development teams access to regulatory documents, registration dossier documents and entire approval packages. They simply enter the name of a medicine, or its trade name, to view all the related data.

PharmaPendium is used primarily by the development teams – in particular, clinicians doing phase I, II and III studies and dossier submission – to determine which classes of medicines produce particular effects in given situations.

Prior to the introduction of PharmaPendium, the company's developmental clinicians would primarily use Drugs@FDA, a searchable catalog of FDA-approved drug products; however, they did not find everything they needed there or in the other databases they used.

In contrast, PharmaPendium enables regulatory affairs staff and clinicians to quickly and easily access historical approval data to determine which questions the US drug authority posed to other pharmaceutical companies developing similar products.

The benefits to the pharmacokinetic teams have been particularly remarkable. According to a customer the greatest impact of the PK module is on the company's 'licensing in' activity — the assessment of new external opportunities. It allows companies to quickly extrapolate PK data for potential in-licensing products, enabling their specialists to run software models, ensuring more precise estimates.

Clinicians also use PharmaPendium's FDA approval package information when designing clinical studies and development plans. PharmaPendium helps clinicians understand the FDA's requirements and questions and thus saves time.

Developers and researchers competed for $35,000 in Elsevier's largest app contest yet

Elsevier is building an "ecosystem" of researchers and developers who can build apps that meet the challenges of science researchers. The Apps for Science competition was the latest initiative, drawing 380 registrants from seven countries. They competed for over four months from April to July to build apps on SciVerse.

"We want long-lasting relationships with these developers," said Vishal Gupta, Director of the Developer Network. "If you (as a developer) have an innovative idea, we provide you the tools, content and the platform. We want you to partner with us, build apps and make a difference for our end users."

Challenges like this are attracting experts from around the world: the talented developers whose ideas may ultimately be showcased by Elsevier, and the judges, who are leaders in their fields and can serve as advisors and development partners.

"We witnessed that research is done in teams and across ... organization borders," said Leo Sauermann, who developed the app "Refinder," winning second prize.

Twenty-seven apps were selected to be judged by a panel of seven experts, which chose winners for five of the prizes. The apps were selected for their capacity to help researchers "navigate scientific content, improve scientific search, visualize sophisticated data in more insightful and attractive ways and stimulate collaboration." In addition, a Popular Choice Prize was awarded for the app that received the most votes from the public.

The Apps for Science website has over 6,000 followers, according to the number of people who signed up to vote on the apps or keep up with contest news. The site has also drawn over 34,000 unique visitors. The Application Marketplace and Developer Network team has now implemented some of these apps on SciVerse Applications, where the apps are available to more than 15 million SciVerse users. The developers will retain full intellectual property rights to their submissions.

Elsevier Acquires Ariadne Genomics, Provider of Pathway Analysis Tools and Semantic Technologies for Life Science Researchers

Whether biologists are developing new drugs or drought-resistant plants, they must search through vast amounts of information contained in journals, documents and databases to obtain a complete perspective. Ariadne Genomics, a company acquired by Elsevier, provides tools that present a comprehensive network of interconnected biological facts to scientists by retrieving and indexing myriad findings from scientific literature.

Ariadne's flagship product, Pathway Studio, is widely used by pharmaceutical, agricultural and academic institutions. It presents "the big picture" in biological systems to reveal the cause and effect behind observations. For example, researchers use Pathway Studio to interpret gene expression experiments, to identify biological processes and pathways most affected by disease and drugs, and to create publications and communicate complex biological concepts.

MedScan, Ariadne's proprietary platform technology, is a high-fidelity text-mining and indexing engine that can rapidly process scientific manuscripts to produce highly structured biological databases. MedScan is used to produce two databases for Pathway Studio: a mammalian database that coalesces biological information related to human health (includes humans, rats and mice), and a plant database for agricultural researchers.

Combined Elsevier and Ariadne offerings will deliver better insights to research discovery and the understanding of disease mechanisms. "As a customer of both providers, I am excited to learn that Ariadne Genomics and Elsevier have joined," said Dr. Jonathan Usuka, Director of Global Business Planning at Celgene, a multinational biopharmaceutical company. "Pathway Studio provides essential support to our immunological studies. As part of Elsevier, there is the potential to deliver even more value to our researchers."

"With our integration into Elsevier, we look forward to strengthening our ability to serve biological researchers in scientific communities through further development of Pathway Studio, fortified with Elsevier's content, and complementing Elsevier's leadership role across biomedical disciplines," said Ariadne's CEO, Ilya Mazo.

Elsevier Acquires QUOSA

QUOSA is a Boston-based software company that specializes in developing content management and workflow productivity solutions for researchers and information managers.

Elsevier has collaborated with QUOSA since 2007, when we incorporated QUOSA's PDF Download Manager into Scopus and later ScienceDirect, which are now on the SciVerse platform. This acquisition marks a continuation of this collaboration, which has boosted research productivity for the users of both platforms.

As QUOSA President and CEO Malcolm MacKenzie stated in the press release: "QUOSA empowers enterprises to share full-text scientific information faster and more efficiently, helping users to get more out their information while controlling costs, all with one easy-to-use copyright observant solution. Both our customers and the wider research community stand to benefit from the pooling of resources and expertise with Elsevier."

Elsevier will support QUOSA's current solutions and platform, including Information Manager and Virtual Library, while developing QUOSA's technological capabilities into Elsevier-branded solutions. The aim is to enhance the search-and-discovery process and enable researchers and information professionals to manage information more efficiently at the various stages of the research workflow, including organizing, archiving and sharing.

"Our acquisition of QUOSA ensures that we continue to deliver more value to our customers by improving the search, retrieval, management, analysis and sharing of the increasingly disparate types of information required to improve research outcomes," explained Alexander Van Boetzelaer, Managing Director of Elsevier Corporate Markets. "QUOSA brings to Elsevier an innovative offering and technological expertise that align well with Elsevier today."

QUOSA was founded in 1996 by Harvard- and MIT-affiliated mathematicians who were researching contextual search applications, according to QUOSA's website. The company began by targeting the academic and government segments and now also serves a range of corporate customers, including more than half of the top 25 pharma-biotech companies.