Artist in Residence
Today's scientists are facing an information overload. But as Graham Phillips reports art is coming to their rescue. At the California Institute of Technology, artist- in-residence - David Kremers is teaching scientists the techniques used by nineteenth century impressionist artists, like van Gough and Monet to interpret their research information.
The scientists apply the rules of brushstroke etc. to their scientific graphics and the beautiful pictures that result give them new insights into the meaning of their data.
This Catalyst story follows Russ Jacobs, a scientist who has applied David's teaching to his data - the mass of information that comes from an MRI brain scanner. Russ Jacobs is using the MRI scans to search for the early signs of multiple sclerosis in the brain. These signs show that the disease will develop, even though no symptoms have yet appeared. He's using mice at the moment, but eventually the technique will be used for humans.
Narration: Artist, David Kremers, is explaining van Gough's painting techniques to a very unlikely audience. These guys are scientists who form that temple of science the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Russ Jacobs, for example, studies the brain's neural structures.
Dr Russ Jacobs: If I want to accentuate the differences between three or four neural structures one would want to put some sort of discontinuous colour between two light colours.
Narration: Why would a bunch of science people want to learn about the arts? Well, it's because the sciences have developed some problems lately - computer problems. Now, obviously computers have been fantastic for science. Because they can crunch so many numbers so quickly, they've allowed researchers to tackle more and more complex problems. But what's happening now is that computers are becoming so powerful, the mountains of data they generate are almost overwhelming. Scientists are starting to suffer information overload. That's where David Kremers' art techniques for visualising the data come in.
David Kremers: After I talked to them about this sort of thing I could see that they were totally out to lunch, they didn't understand what I was talking about. And that's when I started taking them around to museums, because I began to realise that I had to train their eyes to see things the way painters saw them in order to continue on with this work.
Narration: These are scientific diagrams of water flowing through a Y-shaped pipe... done by David's first students - engineering professors. Unlike conventional diagrams they have brushstrokes in them - to convey things that can't be seen, like the sense of movement of this water. That's David's lesson Number One.
Narration: Brushstrokes can be thick or thin. They can start out heavy and lighten...or do the reverse. But using a variety of them will allow scientists to put far more meaning into their computer graphics, says David. Just look at what van Gough was able to convey.
David Kremers: He can give this a sense of things that we can't see. So we can have a sense of the wind blowing through the tree. We know that this is a very bright and sunny day.// But we can also see that it's a very sort of blustery afternoon because of this great activity in the tree and the way that he's accentuated the stroke, normal curves in the tree."
Narration: But this is more than about drawing pretty pictures, insists David. Van Gough's techniques should help these guys do better science as well. Take Russ Jacobs' research. He puts mice that will one day develop multiple sclerosis through a scanner. He's trying to find the very first signs of brain deterioration; signs that happen way before symptoms appear. But he's got a serious information-overload problem. These raw images of the mouse may look informative but they actually say very little, because there's too much information in them. Russ and David are trying to work out a way of distilling out just the data that show the tiny brain changes indicating MS.
Dr Russ Jacobs: One of the hard things about doing science is figuring out what you can ignore. Because you can ignore 90% of this image.
Graham Phillips: So to sort that out it's basically a problem of working out what to play up.
Dr Russ Jacobs: What to play up, yes.
Narration: That's David Kremers' Lesson Number Two. How to play up some parts of your picture and play down others - to draw the eye to only the important parts.
David Kremers: And what he's doing is he's encouraging our eye to travel up and across the grass and up these stairs, right."
Narration: Using David's lessons, Russ hoped he could make more sense of his magnetic resonance data. Here's how he tried to visualise the information before meeting David.
Dr Russ Jacobs: You know again it's hard to see what's happening here because they're tiny ellipsoids and there's no correlation with anything in the normal realm..
Graham Phillips: They just look like black and white dots to me!
Dr Russ Jacobs: Yeah, looks like black and white dots. So that's where David comes in. . how do you take all that data and make it so that it tells you something visually immediately.
Narration: The pink brush strokes show the direction water is flowing through this mouse's tissue, information that can be used to determine whether there's brain damage or not.
Narration: On the left is a healthy specimen, because there's strong flow mainly in the one direction.
Dr Russ Jacobs: You can see these brush strokes look like things are coming out of here. Things are going in at you.
Narration: But for the brain on the right there are spots where the flow is weak and lacks direction. They have early MS damage.
Dr Russ Jacobs: Immediately your eye is drawn down here and that's where things are important. So just that, just drawing your eye to the area of the experiment where something important is happening is crucial, it really is. It sounds simple, but it's important, where I need to ignore.
Narration: Clear visualisation of scientific data doesn't just make life easier for researchers, it gives them a faster and deeper understanding of what's going on, says Russ. And that's why he and David are using all the tricks in the artists' pallet for their next project - the virtual mouse. Where not just brain images will be rendered, but a complete mouse atlas will be created. You wonder why science didn't start collaborating with arts years ago.
Dr Russ Jacobs: I think it's because of complexity issues. Often times all you need to do is draw the points on a graph and draw a line through them and that explains the data and that's all you need. But you can't do that any longer. Now we're sort of rising on an exponential. So there's lots more data and it's more complicated.
Narration: So one lot of scientists, at least, doesn't share that common science view that David and his ilk are just a bunch of arty farty types.
David Kremers: Well I think what happens is that scientists who work with me begin to see that indeed art is just as rigorous as science is. And after they begin to revise it and they begin to learn that there is quite a lot that they can learn from art. And as soon as they begin to see that there are some useful things that art can bring science then they're sold on it.