Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Visual Mastery, Enhancing Medical Presentations for Impactful Education. On behalf of ASCP, it's a warm welcome to all of you as you all trickle in. Take a look at the slide and get ready to understand visual mastery with me and my friend, Dr. Konstantin Kanakis. So the idea today is for us to understand how to convey our message with visual language to our audience in the most effective way and to be impactful. And so as you can see, if you have been to any of our ASCP webinars before, this is not the way we typically present things. Our branding is very different. And so it's really tongue-in-cheek to tell you that we will be able to take you from this to this. So let's go ahead and get started. There's some housekeeping announcements first. And so the webinar reminders are that recording is in progress. We will not be discussing any protected health or personally identifiable information for patients here. And there is CME and CMLE credit offered. And the information for that is towards the end. So the speakers today are myself. My name is Kamran Mirza. I'm a professor of pathology and the director of the Division of Education Programs and assistant chair of education in the Department of Pathology at Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan. And today, I have the great pleasure of being joined by Dr. Konstantin Kanakis, a good friend of mine, and the quality chief resident for APCP at Loyola University Chicago Stritt School of Medicine. He's also adjunct faculty at Loyola Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health. So together, Dr. Kanakis and I will be dealing with this idea of how visual mastery is done. Again, we would like to tell you that it's kind of an intimate group here today. So the chat is open. We would love to see some Zoom reactions as well. And we're happy to kind of interact with you while you're here on Zoom. And if you would like to engage with this presentation or what you're learning from this on social media, our handles are given under our names as well. So the objectives of today's talk are to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of various design elements such as color schemes, fonts, and layouts in medical presentations, the goal being to enhance clarity and audience engagement, to apply the principles of instructional design to create diagrams, infographics, and other visual aids that accurately simplify and represent complex medical data and processes, and to synthesize knowledge of your audience background and needs to customize the presentation content, ensuring it is accessible and educational across different levels of medical expertise. And so I would like to say that this slide was probably the worst slide to show you only because it goes against everything we want to kind of teach you, meaning that I was reading off the side because I really did want you to understand what the objectives were. Also, if I was to critique this slide, I would say there's probably a lot of content on it, but that's because those were the objectives that we will be dealing with you guys today. Thank you, Dr. Mirza, for transitioning here to the end of the ground rules section. It's an honor to be here today. As you said, my name is Dr. Konstantin Kanakis. And as we talk more about what makes a good presentation in the visual mastery section, we're going to talk about various aspects that we can work on together. And while we do this, I encourage everybody to really do engage with the chat, raise your hand. If you have questions, please ask us while we're doing this. It's going to be a dynamic session. So as we look at these slides, we're going to inlay various features of bad slides. There was some take home pre-session slides that we distributed. We're going to identify the key features that make good and bad slides. We're going to edit live for clarity and visual mastery. We're going to show what a brand means and what it means to have a nice marketability. So when you talk about this, there's a thoughtful toolkit that I'd like to frame in your mind when we do this. Appearance, action, articulation, accessibility. I kept it easy. I just put things that started with A, an easy to remember box here so that you can go one by one and think about questions when you're actually making your content. First in appearance, is it captivating? Does it look nice? Is it professional, clean, crisp? Are the things on the slide in the right margins, in the right places? Would you be excited by this if you were watching this from the audience? And Dr. Merz and I always talk about this 10% notion where if you're making something and it looks good, you can always do just 110% to take it just over that to make it very appealing and exciting for you. And that's purely subjective. Everybody's version of the extra 10% is their own and that's what makes this whole visual mastery concept unique. Next in action, when you're putting the content into the slides, there's choices you have to make. Do you want a wall of text? Do you want three large objectives that you're going to read from a screen? Would you rather have an infographic? Are the visual choices exciting and dynamic? Do the graphics work? If you're making a list, do they go in some sort of order? Can you animate this sort of with either moving transitions or shapes? And when you actually have the content, how you want to articulate that is very, very important. When you move on to the actual content of the text, are you saying the exact message that you want the audience to hear? Did you copy or have a primary source that you sort of kind of took from to make your message come across? What are you trying to say exactly? Case in point, if you're trying to say something about this slide, what would you take home from this? I'm hoping the four A's of appearance, action, articulation, and accessibility, which all appear equal in this infographic I just made from scratch to create successful communication. Finally, accessibility is something that's really important. I have a hearing condition, so sometimes when I'm in an audience live, it may be hard to hear what's going on if the slides don't exactly match the exact content being spoken. So can all of your audiences understand the point? If somebody can't hear you at all and watches this later on mute or only receives the handout months from now, are they going to get the point across? There are different learning styles. Some people like to read. Some people need a video. Some people just need images and need to listen to you. Be aware of all the different people that come to your audience. When we think about it, thank you, Dr. Kanakas. So when we think about this, I'll pause here for a second. I love that Dr. Kanakas brought up the extra 10%. And I think that it may seem a little redundant when you're making the slides, but small shifts in the text, in the color, in like the alignment of your slides can make actually a huge difference. They can be distracting. And ultimately what you don't want is that people, even if it's not conscious, even if it's unconscious, that they're focusing on those changes that happen in your slide rather than the content of your slide. And so I think that that's a really important thing to kind of keep in mind. Ultimately, what we want to do is that we are, you know, if we take all the A's and, you know, kind of elaborate on them in the appearance, you know, really, like I was mentioning, you want it to hold interest. If the appearance of the slide is not going to hold interest, it's not that the design of it is the main content, but, you know, it needs to be able to support the main content. And so the idea would be to focus attention because of the design choices that you make, and also to be able to guide discussions and overviews. And here, you know, the use of animations, which are appropriate and, you know, kind of pointing out certain things is going to be important. Ultimately, all of these are so that you can support the message that is being delivered. In an earlier version of this, kind of in the educator's toolkit, we, you know, showed you multiple ways that this could happen. And, you know, and like really this idea that, you know, you can make the same content, you know, easily digestible, you know, I'd like to emphasize or underscore that by, again, showing you this really well-known paragraph of text. And the idea is that even though the color isn't bad here, the branding is, you know, on point with AACP, look at how much text there is here. And is it okay for people to follow what I'm trying to say if I was going to read this out? But if you were to convert this and just take this and make it align in a way that there is a header and a subheader, et cetera, the same content can be distilled in a way that, number one, you're not reading off all the slide, number two, it is much more easily visually digestible, right? And so, this is kind of the, these are the tools that we, I guess, are trying to teach you because visually as you see them, it's easier to understand what mistakes we potentially could make. When I was in training, people used to talk a lot about the blue background with the yellow font. And I think that, you know, we have to keep in mind dynamic visual choices when it comes to choosing color, right? And contrast is really, really important when we consider a good mix of colors versus a bad mix of colors. And I think that this is just important, not only from an aesthetic standpoint, right? Because there will be branding. For example, here, this is an AACP brand. There's the blue banner and the white background and the text is a particular color because, you know, even when you look at the bottom right corner, the educator's toolkit has toolkit italicized, it's in a different color. And so, that's the branding, right? And so, using different colors, which are on the screen, which are bad kind of dynamics with each other is going to be an issue. Also, as Dr. Kanak has already pointed out, you have to keep in mind that your learner might be differently able when it comes to picking up on color. So, you need to be aware of individuals who may perceive color differently. And this is an important aspect when we consider the DIB of the choices that we make in design. Similarly, inappropriate use of tables. So, look at this table. Usually, people will put this up and they'll say something kind of like, oh, this isn't meant to be readable, right? And sometimes it's okay if it's not meant to be readable because maybe there's a trend that you're trying to show or maybe there's, you know, kind of a visual graphic area that you're trying to show. But if you're really expecting people to read something like this, that can be an issue. And again, from the DIB angle, I would say that, you know, inappropriate use of tables will distract from your message. So, it's not just that it's not going to be the correct visual or aesthetic choice. It's also not going to really supplement or support what you're trying to convey from a pedagogy perspective as well. So, you know, they've been studied, right? And the studies that have shown what is happening in ineffective PowerPoints have shown that reading slides word to word, like I kind of did in the objective slide, it's 60% of those that PowerPoints that are ineffective. The text being too small is approximately half of the PowerPoints that people found to be ineffective. And using full sentences was around 50% as well. And this is another thing that, you know, Dr. Kanakis had pointed out. If you're using text from a particular source, even if you're citing it correctly, if you're going to copy paste the paragraph, often what I find is that there will be commas at the end of sentences because you've literally picked it out from the text of some other place. And then, you know, you're converting the prose into bullet points. And when that happens, it can be pretty easily identifiable when you do it in a way that isn't smooth or it isn't, wasn't meant to be. So, I think that, you know, restructuring the content so that you're not using full sentences and you're speaking the full sentences, this takes, you know, that actually, you know, checks two boxes. One is that you're not going to read slides word for word because there won't be complete sentences. You'll be effectively making the sentences as you speak. The other is that also actually takes away the third point, right? Because the text typically will then not be too small because you're not trying to jam in so many things at the same time. And again, looking at that from a perspective of having closed captions being on, et cetera, those are important because now when you take away much of the content from the text, which somebody could have read, it's important to have closed captions on so that, you know, anyone who is differently able in their reading ability or their hearing ability can also kind of see the same content on closed captions. You know, naturally, this audience is mostly going to be pathologists and laboratory professionals. And so, I think that we're really visual people and the resolution of imagery is very, very important. And so, you know, it's not a bad time to kind of quickly review what resolution is. So, the resolution of an image is the number of pixels per inch in a bitmap image, right? And so, the more you have, the more dots per inch of the DPI, the higher the resolution. And in general, higher resolution means better quality. And what I've always said to my trainees is that, you know, we are visual people and, like, have images be large. Don't stretch them out. Please make them appropriately enlarged. If you are enlarging them, very quickly, we'll be able to tell if something has been squished or smooshed or brought out in a format that isn't kind of balanced, right? And so, here is the concept of taking an image that is low quality and then enlarging it. And you can see that pixelation, right, because of the fact that there's one pixel here, you know, really is being enlarged in a way. Now, it's important to understand that PowerPoint, though, can only display 92 DPI on screen. And so, that's an interesting thing when it comes to either visually preparing something to deliver or to send. And so, when you think about this, an image that will, you know, so there are two images put together here. On the left, you have 300 DPI. And on the right, you have 72 DPI. And you really can't tell the difference other than a little bit of clarity that is more kind of in the image and the sharper edges compared to a little bit of fuzziness here. And that's because the screen is only showing you around 90 or 92 DPI as it is. But when you were to send this to someone or when you were to compress this and print it, that's when this difference would show. And there's an important, you know, reminder as to think about, you know, the content and how it's going to be deployed. If it's going to be more than just a PowerPoint that you're giving on a monitor, then it's important to remember that, you know, copy pasting images from locations will change their DPI. And importing it through the PowerPoint function changes it as well. And so, then when you email it, if you are compressing the images, that also changes the resolution. And so, it's important to keep in mind. The last thing in this section I'll talk about is the consistency, which we've already talked about for branding. I think that it's really important to come across with a strong brand, right? And so, here you can see that the background color with the foreground font, the coloration is off. Like, some contrast is okay. But by and large, this is not a very visually appealing slide. And so, it's important, again, to remember that, you know, certain fonts will be easier for differently abled people to read. Certain colors will be a better distinguish. And I think that if I look at this, there's no branding, right? Here, there's no branding. I have no idea of what is being told to me. And I think it's important for us to kind of consider that. Lastly, like, I mean, you know, before we transition on looking at the slides that we had sent you, I really want to mention that, you know, sometimes this is pretty easy to do. There's a designer function in the newest version of PowerPoint, right? So, if you go into Home on the right, if there's an image that it will kind of recommend you design. And so, literally, I've taken a snapshot from a couple of days ago when I was making this PowerPoint, my part of the PowerPoint, you can see that the designer function, when you kind of click here, there's designer, you know, the title just said designer function, and it started populating all these, like, different ways that the slide could look. So, it's not that you have to come from a really kind of properly educated aesthetic kind of thing. You can actually use the PowerPoint functions. Often, you know, you can use Canva subscriptions. There are some free Canva programs as well. And similarly, there are multiple other things that you can use to probably enhance the visual effectiveness of your slides. But before that, we will now move to looking at the pre-session slides that we sent you. All right. So, let's stay on this slide just for a second before we jump in. I was reminded of a lot of these topics. I just submitted some draft for a publication with some colleagues here at Loyola, and it was returned with comments that said some of our graph images that I made, I chose red and blue for contrast. They said some colorblind audience readers may not be able to tell the difference, and I found myself guilty of one of the, like, problems that we're talking about today. So, we changed one of them to a textured line and one of them to a solid line, keeping the red and blue. But there's all of these discussion points that happen in papers and presentations when you're making images. And in an ideal world, what I've seen personally and what I've seen studies show is that a PowerPoint, a slide deck, a presentation that is just images with a person talking often has the most impactful kind of message across, except for those who might need captions or something like that. So, with all that said, the DEI aspect, let's jump into the slides that we distributed. And we got a couple good responses from folks that edited these ahead of time. And all these slides, the whole presentation, not just bad ones that we're talking about now, I showed them to my wife, and she saw that my name here was misspelled, and that was her only comment. So, thanks. I mean, that's helpful. But detail-oriented of those among us will notice all these little things. So, this extra 110% that we keep bringing up is important because it shows a nice consistency and professional quality in the message and image you bring across, because it translates to what you are. So let's break this down a little bit. If I was an audience member looking at this, this is sort of a brash red color for the text kind of yelling at me on this bright white background. I don't know what's going on. The spacing of the name is a little off, but we'll look at that in a little bit. So not a great start. Let's look at the next slide. This is awful, again, inspired by something that me and some co-residents and other people have seen before. This is not very well done. There's an exciting abbreviation, which is not defined at the top with the same font that you've seen in Avatar, but this font is not the same in the paragraph, which is fully justified for your torturous reading. It has the references copied in there. This is obviously direct lift from the World Health Organization's publication on Langerhansel. But the color of the background, the text color, this is something that's pretty outdated. This looks like when PowerPoint was just invented, this was one of the templates that popped up in the beginning. So again, strike two. All right, a little bit better. If you're just a pathologist in the audience, you're starting to recognize things. So you can sort of piecemeal what's going on here a little bit better. Again, I said, if there are just images on the slide and I'm talking, that's effective, but not if the images are distracting or overlapping or sloppy or sometimes unlabeled. So this is effective to get some points across if I'm here live talking with you, but if I just print this out and give it to you, it's almost worthless. And there's one more. Now, this has some graphs and images and figures from various sources to sort of get a point across about the complexities of diagnosing this random entity that we've picked. But the graphs and algorithms aren't very clearly aligned. And there's, again, just another copy pasta, I like to call it, from the main source publication. So that doesn't really help. So let's see if we can save these slides. So let's look at the first one. Like I said, the title doesn't reveal anything we're going to be talking about. It just sort of yells at you in red. The spelling is off. The spacing is off. It's sterile. It's harsh. And I think it's kind of boring. So we had some good suggestions that we received about this, but we'll look at all the slides before I show you my version of how I would have edited this. So let's look at the next one. In the next one, that wall of text is just distracting. It's horrible. It's outdated. It's not friendly. No one's going to sit there and read it while you're in an audience. They're going to try to pick apart key words while you're talking. It's going to be very distracting. It's too long. It's un-navigatable. It is also lazy. People can tell when you copy and paste something from a primary source because the hyperlinks are there that link to nothing because you're not in the primary source anymore. That distracting font is kind of funny to me. I picked papyrus because there's a whole Saturday Night Live sketch about it. But it's inconsistent and distracting. It's not simple. It's not digestible. And it makes for poor learning. And it makes for a poor presentation of the person presenting. It looks like they don't have a full grasp of the entity they're discussing. And it looks like they're just showing you they may as well be holding you a book open while everybody reads it from the audience. So moving on to the images. The images, again, are a little better, but there's no labels. What's being shown here? Why is it being shown? The overlapping is kind of haphazard and sloppy. There's no natural flow or importance. It's missing a lot of guidance and a lot of support, especially for differently abled audience members, especially for printing this and giving it in enduring content or over a long period of time. So there's a problem here with how these images get their point across unless you're live right in front of them. So there's a limitation built in inherently right here. And finally, the slide with the different algorithms and tables from other sources, what this is supposed to be talking about is the granular detail involved in diagnosing histiocytic sarcomas versus other entities, if it's Langerhans or something. It's not important for this, but the point is that you're supposed to be able to incorporate outside information, galvanize it, and sort of streamline it to make it very easy to understand for your point, for your audience, to make you look good, and to educate whoever you're talking to. So again, poor color choices here. That contrast between yellow and white is just awful. Again, copy and pasting makes you look very, very lazy. And I couldn't tell what's being shown in these graphs just from having made this a few weeks ago and then coming back to it. I wouldn't be able to tell what the point is of any of these charts and graphs. So let's see what we can do. I took the liberty of going one by one, and we're going to look at edits to all of these one by one. There's only four slides. So this was called sterile, harsh, boring, kind of confusing. And it turns into what I liked to create, this dynamic and rich immersion into this diagnosis, this entity, to show the cells that we're going to be talking about. A little zoom in, although I'm sorry, Dr. Meyers, it's kind of blurry, but I did what I could. But it's showing you some of the folded features of that nuclear contour and that cell. The title is a little bit better. It's a quick primer on this diagnosis by a person who knows how to spell their name, who doesn't call themselves Dr. and MD at the end of their name. It's very nice and clean and crisp and consistent. Thanks, Meredith. I think it looks pretty good, too. All right. You know, Meredith was like, oh, this looks amazing. I agree with you, Meredith. If I can just jump in and say, you know, I think that there's so many amazing things about the slide. I think that, you know, the branding, you know, the whole H&E feel of it is cool. The fact that there's a little bit of a shadow underneath your text is really cool. Dr. Kanakis, I think that's amazing. You know, and the idea that the zoom in was not just for aesthetics. It was also because that's the cell of interest. And then, you know, to me, one of the greatest things in the background is the fact that all the features are there and the entirety of the image is being used. Right. We're not using just a part of it. And, you know, but then you haven't confused it. You know, if I may offer all of these positive things, you haven't confused it by putting a white font on top of the cells. You've used a plain background so that it's really, really well-defined. And so that's really good. And Meredith is adding that you can easily do this on Google Slides, Canva, or PowerPoint if you're extra savvy. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, in that sense, you know, these are really, really great. Not to take over your thunder, Dr. Kanakis. Sorry. Not at all. Not at all. Don't change the slide yet. I have to say that this is great. No, no, no. Don't change the slide yet. Go back. Go back. Go back. Oh, sorry. Sorry. My bad. And Meredith is right. And thank you, Dr. Mirza, for the for the quality on this. But the savviness that Meredith brought up doesn't need to be so, you know, in depth. I used literally two things for this. I got a picture. I copied and pasted and zoomed in with the crop function. And then the color choices I used were already the colors in the H&E. I've used the select color and eyedrop to find a pink to create a box. There's already white in the spaces in between the cells and the nuclear contours are purple. I use the same purple from the nucleus to make my name. It's already a familiar sort of color palette to any pathologist is already familiar. Now, if you're the first time seeing this and it sets up the tone for the rest of the presentation. All right. Let's go to the next one. All right. The next one, this infamous, infamously horrible wall of text on a blue background. We can all agree it's terrible. If you're trying to read it right now. I mean, we've we've understood what LCH stands for. If you're a skimmer, if you read books really quickly, I'm seeing the words inflammatory milieu, eosinophils, burbic, but that's an author's name. And then CD 207, because I know what I'm looking for. If you don't know what you're looking for, this is just a scrabble bag that somebody spilled on a blue background. So I turned it into something a little more digestible. Although let me let me admit to you, I'll be the first one. I think this is still a little too busy, but I did try to digest that whole paragraph and just bullet points. And I went through it and I just kind of pressed enter after every sentence that I thought was worth it. I pressed delete on things that I didn't. And then since it's so busy, I made a creative call here and I highlighted within the busy bullets, something I think is really, really important. So if you look, I highlighted four things here. I highlighted that there's going to be a lot of eosinophils. Great. I highlighted there's going to be many longer on cell history sites. Great. I highlighted the diagnostic hallmark is the BIRBEC granule, if you're doing electron microscopy. And if you took it one IHC stain home with you, it's Langerin, CD207. It's a substitute for that BIRBEC granule. And it's at least what you need to know. So stylistically, I can still turn a busy slide into an even smaller slide if I just highlight what I want to. And then there are different styles of citing your sources. So traditionally folks, you know, from all professions and backgrounds will put the text, you know, adapted from or from XYZ and put the whole APA or MLA or Chicago citation on the bottom of the slide or underneath the picture as a caption. I just took a copy of the cover of the WHO Keem book, most updated version, and literally linked it with a QR code that my audience can go directly to it, marked by either the book or the chapter or page, if you want to. You can do whatever customizing you want to do in QR codes, and it takes you right to the primary source. For consistency, and sometimes for the animations, which I didn't do here because we're going back and forth, the H&E slide from the previous title card would transition into the bottom so that you could see all these things consistently. All right. If I may jump in, Dr. Canakis, I love your point. So I think that, you know, a couple of things that come to mind. First of all, the accessibility with the QR code is brilliant because normally the citations are there just to kind of prove a point, but really they're not in any usable format. Even if you put the name there, even if you put a link there, nobody's going to be able to click your screen and get a link out of it, right? So the QR code, I think, is a brilliant use of citation that can, you know, be quickly used while you're speaking. People can, you know, scan the QR code. So I think that that's a really, really cool thing. The other thing that I love about the slide is that it goes back to the same branding that you've used in your start, right? The colors are the same. The banner at the bottom is that LCH image, and I agree with you that, you know, while you have a lot of text here, it still is easier to digest. I love the fact that the spacing between the lines you mentioned that you pressed enter, that's so important. People don't realize that sometimes the paragraph formation can actually change, and especially when you copy paste things, and then the distance between the lines can be variable. And sometimes what that does is that it actually changes the size of the font within the text, and that can actually be quite jarring visually. You know, it seems like a small thing, but it'll look totally different, and I love the use of colors here. So I think that overall, and the fact that you didn't animate this because, you know, you and I discussed that I will be running the slides, so as you all may have guessed, I'm running the slides, and Aki is obviously in a different city. So I think that that's also a really valuable thing about visual mastery, where you will see that actually some of my slides do have a little bit of animation in them, but that's because I know what the animations are, and it's easier for me to animate. If Aki had animated, then it may have been clunkier for us to kind of deploy this, because I may not have known when the things happen. And so I think that that also is part of putting together a visually masterful presentation. Love it. That goes back to the action of the four parts of my toolkit, where you make these dynamic choices, and consistency is key. I did choose the same font arbitrarily. I chose Calibri for this just to be consistent. I went through my new slides and made sure all the font was relatively the same size, spaced out the same bold where it's needed to be bold, headers where it needs to be headers, etc. Okay, the image slide. Great. If you're a pathologist, you know exactly what this is. This is great, but if you're not a pathologist, this is garbage. So I did the same thing, and I moved some images around. I spaced them out very evenly with care about the white bar that shows up in between tables, pictures, graphs, and text. I created bullet points to show two features of picture A. It's the most important feature. And you can just draw a line and circle something. You can insert all these shapes, and you can connect them to your bullet point. There's no rules here. You're making a visual presentation. And again, that QR code is the same QR code for the WHO book that I mentioned before. And I like to use it to sort of engage audience participation. If you're in a room full of people, and you see a bunch of phones go up, oh, great. That kind of signals to me that they're interested in learning more about this. So it gives me a green light to talk more about it. If I'm virtual, which we are today, it gives people the freedom to bookmark something on their phone to look at later, and I just love the accessibility of it. So I broke it down into images. I labeled the images. Image A is this. Image B is this. Image C is this. If you wanted to be more detailed, you would have said H&E or the type of stain or the magnification. But I didn't think it really served us because we're not doing actual pathology talk here. B, I explained what the stain is and what the pattern is. C, I did the same thing. And these are the sort of slam dunk things you need for here. Now, I mentioned a Burbick granule on the last slide, but I never even showed it. And it's so important that you can inlay pictures from other sources and kind of have a sort of aside. It's just like writing something, and then you put a dash, and you're like, well, I also want to say this, and then you go back to your main point. So you can do really whatever you want with text, images, and things as long as things are labeled and clean, organized, and have a flow. And that's a really good thing to keep in mind when you're doing this action, dynamic, graphic choosing. Okay. Now we can go to the next one. It reminds me, Dr. Kanakis, of the visual abstract, right? I mean, really what you've this beautiful thing that you've created is a visual abstract, and it really lends itself very well to kind of looking at the different parts of this. And I agree with you that you don't need in this particular situation, the magnification and the fact that it's an H&E because certain things are self-explanatory. But I do think that going back to your original point, that the most powerful presentations typically are just images, especially in pathology and laboratory medicine. And then I'm actually guilty of this. Many of my presentations don't have all these labels because I'm speaking and describing what it is. But then what that doesn't do really well is that if somebody asks me for that presentation, they'll be entirely lost if they hadn't listened to my presentation in the first place. And so I think that visual abstracts like this that put together pieces of information, point them out, make them clear, can be really, really helpful, really nicely done. It's a double-edged sword. You want to make something very beautiful and accessible, but you also want to make something that people can use without you giving the message there. And I like to imagine my audience whenever I'm making a presentation or a slide or any content to make sure that if an audience member might be too shy to ask me a question, or if an audience member might want to learn more about something, I'll try to sneak in QR codes or space to ask questions or follow up on further information. Okay. This is, I think, my favorite of the four bad slides because it's, in my opinion, worse than the wall of text. I have no idea what's going on in these tables. I have no concept of what all these acronyms mean and what's going on here. And again, it's copy and pasted with an even worse sort of contrast color, white to yellow, than the wall of blue and yellow. So I turned it into a slide I just called caveat, which is just a final sort of tip and trick to diagnosing some of these in the context of other diseases you must rule out. So while the big paragraph in the wall of text and the blue slide was still kind of a busy bullet point slide when I fixed it, I diluted this into just two sentences that you need to know from the bottom paragraph, let's say, of the WHO's article. Distinguishing this diagnosis from other things that may mimic it and how you might do that with the immunophenotype or features that you might find on the microscope. So I took that very long slide infographic from the first left of the bad slide and I cropped out all I wanted, which was just a histologic comparison of disease one, two, and three. And I put that over the algorithm that I actually took from the WHO to sort of tease out how the pathway of diagnosing these things happen. And this presents an opportunity, one, for me to re-reference the WHO, and two, to show you a new way of referencing material from another source at the same time. I put the QR code at the top there and I said at the bottom that it was adapted from XYZ article about this histocytic disorder catalog. So what I would do in real life in this slide was talk about LCH, juvenile disseminated JXC, Erdheim, Chester, Rosi, Dorfman, whatever diseases are involved in this category here. And I would actually talk about them myself to sort of prime the audience and kind of work my way through the algorithm together. If I'm not here and you receive this as a PowerPoint, a printout, a PDF, you can take this, print it, pin it up on your desk, and the next time you see this, you've got some comparative thing here that's a nice useful tool. So you have to keep in mind when these items are going to be used in the future. So with that, I hope some of these edits sort of taught you a little bit about my thought process, the back and forth between me and Dr. Meyers are talking about the quality of what these do. And I hope that you've seen the sort of toolkit in action as I listed it out with the accessibility, the action, the appearance, and the articulation of what you're trying to say, who you're trying to say it to, and keeping in mind how you can best present not only just your content, but yourself. I love that, Dr. Kanaka. So I think that the fact that really this type of thing is, you know, something that they can print and put on their, you know, education boards, et cetera, that lends itself to so much utility. The fact that these boxes and the chart kind of give you almost like a streamlined version of how to think about these, I just, I think it's really, really fantastic. So Dr. Herman asked in the chat about free QR codes, about any advice where to kind of be able to access or make them. I put in Bitly, that's what I use. Do you have any recommendations for where to create a free QR codes? Yeah, I, this might be a generational divide, but I'll go to Google and search free QR code generator. I do that first one. That's not sponsored. That's right. Can I make them do? Yeah, I think I agree with you. I think Canva makes them as well. I feel like one of the splurges that I did was have a Canva account. I feel like I'm involved in enough things where I feel like I can justify it. And so I understand that not everybody will have it. I know that Dr. Herman is very artistic and has her own account too, but I think that there will be certain ones. I think Bitly gives you, I think a couple of free ones a month or something. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I think that they've been changing it, but there are some, and I do the same where I would go, like Dr. Kanakas said, I would go and say, Hey, you know, free Google search for free QR codes. All right. So to burn your eyes again, here we are going back. And I think that as Dr. Kanakas and I were preparing for this. I wondered if augmented intelligence or large learning models can have an impact on the way we do visual mastery. And so I decided to use this as a test case. And so here is this image of this slide, right? And so I thought that let's ask chat GPD what it would do to enhance the visual mastery of this. And in, you know, in some ways I'm really, really scared what it was able to do, but I'm going to take you through what it is. And so we remember this slide. I'm not going to go over it again. But what I did was initially I made it a picture, but then I realized if I make a picture, then it's not going to be able to read it. And so I actually just took the single slide and saved it as test slide dot PPTX. You can see that. And I asked chat GPD, this is literally a snapshot of what I asked it today. I said, how can I make this slide more visually appealing and a good teaching tool? So guess what it does. It says to enhance the visual appeal and educational effectiveness of the slide, consider the following suggestions. It says visual design enhancements, simplify the text, reduce the amount of text on the slide, focus on key points and use bullet points. So for example, it says accumulation of large history sites with complex nuclear contours, minimal nuclear ATP and variable mitotic activity. It's almost as if it has already taken this presentation by Dr. Kanakis and I, and use those tools, right? So then the second one it says is that it's use, use visual aid. So incorporate images, diagrams, or illustrations appropriately. Like microscopic images of LCH cells and Birkbeck granules and diagrams showing the inflammatory milieu. It literally took a second to put this up, highlight key terms and have a consistent layout. You know, I don't want to say that Dr. Kanakis and I are redundant because chat GPT is telling you everything, but, you know, I'm really glad that we were able to hopefully tell some of you that you can actually do this. Now, mind you that the version of chat GPT that I used is the version where you can upload a document to it. And so that is a paid version, or if your institution, our institution allows you that access. And so otherwise there isn't that ability to upload things. So it says, so then I asked it, you know, what would be the teaching tool enhancements? And so it said that first you need to make some interactive elements. And so include elements like hyperlinks or relevant articles or videos explaining LCH in more detail, just like Dr. Kanakis put the QR codes. It says in the use of color scheme, use that in a way to differentiate and retain, for example, different colors for different types of cells or markers. I'm, I'm not kidding you. This is not that we saw this first. This literally was, you know, almost like kind of last minute that I put this in. Annotations, add annotations or call-outs to images, a summary section. So to add a summary section at the end, and then have a question prompt, include a question or prompt for discussion at the end of the slide. But then chat GPT did something really crazy. At the same time, after giving me all of these things, it said, I will now apply these suggestions to your slide. It did it itself. I didn't ask it to do anything. I had uploaded a slide and I was bowled away. I was like, no way, no way. Is it going to do this? But I waited. I know I, I didn't wait, nothing happened. And so then I was like, okay, what is it going to do? So I said something like, okay, go ahead. Right. Or I gave it a prompt. And then it told me that it looks like the slide does not have a title placeholder. It found a problem in my slide, although it did have the LCH on top. Right. So it said, I'll add the title manually along with the other enhancements. And so let's proceed with that approach. I'll create a new slide with the necessary elements and adjustments. And then it said, I have created a new slide with the suggested enhancements. You can download it using the link below. And then it has a clickable link. It says, updated test slide. And then it said, feel free to review it and let me know if any additional adjustments are needed. Here is the slide it created. I hadn't given it any branding or anything. It created a title of Langerhans cell histiocytosis LCH. It gave me five bullet points in which it basically described accumulation of histiocytes, atypia, although minimal nuclear atypia is probably not correct. Atypia is probably not the best thing, right? So there are some hallucinations. The inflammatory milieu, the Birber granules and the markers. And then it said image placeholder because it couldn't create an image of LCH. But to be honest with you, I didn't ask it to create an image. I could have gone back and actually now I'm regretting it. Maybe we should do it live. I wanted to go back and say, Hey, based on this information, can you create a visual of what LCH looks like? And chances are that it would probably create something. And then at the end, it gave a summary. And I'm using this as is. So I didn't move around anything like this isn't how I would present it. I would probably move things up and down, but literally showing you how much it was able to kind of give. And so in the summary, it says LCH is characterized by specific histiocyte accumulation, minimal nuclear atypia and diagnostic Birber granules. And so I think that there's a little bit of hallucination here. But, you know, I think that anyway, then it says discussion question. What are the implications of identifying Birber granules in a sample? And I think that that may not be the most relevant question. But I think that in an audience like this, asking this type of question and expecting your responses would be, I would think, a way to, you know, kind of engage you in a way that was different. And so I think that overall, I would give it like four out of five stars. Pretty spectacular. I mean, if not five out of five, I think that this is better than some faculty, frankly, some faculty or some trainees, the slides that we've seen. I mean, I think that it's done really, really great. And I think that, you know, it's definitely a tool that we can use. And and, you know, as as I've been thinking, as I've been talking about it, I think that, you know, while we're on the Q&A, which I'm going to hand over to Dr. Kanakis, I'll see if I can ask Chachi to create an LCH image. And if something happens, I'll show it. I'll switch my screen and show it to you. But over to you, Dr. Kanakis. Thank you. That was cool. We're out of a job. No, we're not. OK, Terminator is real. That's scary. But I love that. It's a great tool. And I use Chachi or other augmented large machine learning items all the time. There's something built into the Microsoft suite called Copilot. A lot of folks have access to that through their institution. There's a version of Chachi that's free by text. So you can do summaries. You can paste that whole text wall and say, turn this into the three digestible bullet points. It'll do it easy. It's a computer box. So input, output, you have to really kind of know what you want. But a few things I'd love to share just before we start taking questions while you're thinking of them, I hope, is that Dr. Merz and I have been doing presentations and PowerPoints and things for years, both at different levels, teaching students of all kinds. I even have a little bit of media training as of recently. And I think the most effective thing to keep in mind, in addition to the toolkit of what I kind of set out for you about accessibility and dynamic imagery and your messages, that while image based PowerPoints are the most effective, telling a story is the most effective human interaction to get a message across. So Dr. Merz approved that just now. He was telling a story about how he showed this to Chachi Petit and what happened and how he felt. And when you talk about things like that, audiences will remember that hand over foot over next presentation, hands down. So impactful things are to share stories. And also they call this sort of reference in media culture, but not burying the lead. Right. So if you have a point, you should say it clearly, say it up front and then kind of walk your audience through the journey with you on what you might need to do. So, Dr. Merz, you're having trouble with the live screen share. But if people have questions while you'd like to do that, I'm happy to answer them or discuss. Dr. Herman in the chat says, what's the best font and size? Depends on you. I think Dr. Merz and I are both like Team Calibri for some reason. We are. It just looks clean. It does. They don't pay us anything. But I swear to you, I put the Calibri in. Yeah, I'm going to stop share. And while you're answering the question, I'm going to try and see if Chachi Petit can give us an answer. Sure. Sure, sure. For the longest time, Dr. Herman, Microsoft had a default font. It was Times New Roman. And then because people wanted to hang on to the serifs, little bits on the ends of C's and H's and T's. And then as more people use computer screens, sans serif or just nice, simple letters were like better. So Calibri became the new standard. And now Calibri is kind of going away. And there's a new standard called the Topos, which I don't like. But they're all in the sort of like Helvetica, Arial font family. And if you're listening, I'm totally nerding out about fonts. It's kind of embarrassing. But still, I like nice, simple, clean sans serifs. And I use sort of size and bolding, sometimes embossing with a shadow to set apart different titles or headings. And then I use colors because Calibri is really good about being bold and displaying a color. So that's a good question, actually. But size wise, I sort of go by slide and see how much text I have. I don't like a big, empty slide with just like three words on it. But it depends what you're trying to do. All right. I'm actually going to share my screen. I hope this works. This is all live, ladies and gentlemen and all persons. OK, so I didn't do that. Wow. OK, so you guys can see it. So I said, can you this is after this is literally the same thing that I showed you before. This was the test slide. So I said, can you create an image of LCH? And this is kind of what it did. You can see that it totally hallucinated. God knows which language it's like trying to use with the key features highlighted. You can use this image in your presentation. No, you can't, because this is why Dr. Kanakis, we will still have jobs. Can you make a few? That is a nightmare image. That's awful. All right. So let's see if it can make us you know, this is really great. I'm really glad that it isn't able to do it. But anyway, and so, you know, Dr. Herman, for your question, I think that typically I try to keep them between size 20 and size 40. I wasn't paying attention for the last second. So I'm sorry if Dr. Kanakis already said that. So here you go. You know, God knows what type of cancer cell it's created. So maybe it can maybe I can say I'm using resources on the Internet and you create an image of the perfect LCH cell. Let's see what it's what it does. And this is a great exercise because the knowledge in these machine learning items are not as kind of accurate as you might want. Sometimes you have to filter them. So it's a great tool anyway. And it's this is the site's. Oh, I saw Ash Image Bank, we might be in business here. Well, that's great. But maybe I'll just say. And I'm always very polite. I have to say, please, this is just how I am. So let's see what it does. If it's accurate, I'm logging off. It was accurate. We will probably just ask you to delete this entire webinar. I'm just joking. I mean, but those are pretty like those are pretty incredible resources. Again, CEO, I am one of the. No way. All right. I'm really glad that this is what it came up with. And so if you are a pathologist in the audience, you know that this isn't what we're looking for. So I'm really glad that even though it gave us some visual mastery help, but it was more stylistic rather than content driven. So I think that we have to be very careful about the hallucinations that augmented intelligence can do and avoid them as much as possible. But I think that there's no harm in allowing augmented intelligence to better our deployment of anything. I mean, it's just a tool. And so use it as administrative support as you can. But I think that hopefully, you know, in the last couple of minutes, if there's no other questions, hopefully, you know, like Dr. Canakis was mentioning, we were able to kind of give you some practical tips and things that you can walk away with, right? Take a slide and kind of a raw, unformatted format. And, you know, and visualize how to make it more effective, how to use the correct colors, how to be inclusive in your deployment and kind of how to use animations and all sorts of stuff. And then maybe even look at resources that are freely available for designing. Any last thoughts, Dr. Canakis, as we wait for any questions? No, I appreciate the discussion of using tools. And I just I really want to hammer home the point about, you know, asking yourself how you would be impressed if you were an audience member. I see some questions here. I'll take a stab at them. Yeah, yeah. Do you use any resources for polling questions during presentation? I actually do sometimes. Yes. There's a free resource called Poll Everywhere or Poll EV. And you can incorporate them live into your presentation, whereby people type a link or log in to a certain thing and can actively engage with you in real time. And then you get these images that it produces for you about who's responding to what you can create word quilts. You can have a pie chart, a bar graph. You can have people vote. You can have people guess free text or multiple choice. And it's really good. And then another question here, which you please take a stab at these two best background color and type color. It depends. It's really up to you. I'm I think Dr. Merza showed a couple great examples of bad versions of contrast combos, but just make sure that it's easy to read, comfortable on the eyes and not distracting. Yeah, no, I fully agree. I think that, you know, more by and large, you're going to be saved because inevitably, if you are a part of an organization or if you're giving the talk on behalf of an organization, they will have a branding template already. Right. So, for example, Dr. Canakis and I didn't come up with this template that you're seeing. This is the ASDP template. So for us, it was already inbuilt. And so those are also things that you can work with. There's a way that you can go into like if we're talking about PowerPoint, you can go in and edit the slide master. And so the slide master is basically what you see effectively, where it shows you the size, the spacing, the color of the format. Everything is in there. And so when you're putting in new slides, you can use one of the edited slides kind of like from the template. And so, for example, my institution has marketing guidelines. It has color guidelines, right? It literally has a code for the color that, you know, the two colors that represent my institution. Similarly for your institution, there will likely be a logo and a color and there will probably be some resource on how to use it. And so what I do if I'm kind of starting from scratch or if the institution or organization doesn't have a branding template is to kind of come up with one. Right. And so, for example, if it's a conference, I will take the logo of the conference and the location and then my social handles and I'll put them at the bottom. And then I'm going to look at what colors might work best. I have to admit to you, I am very much a person who likes white backgrounds and dark colored fonts. I think that historically, when when people were projecting things on like projector screens, that didn't show up really well. And I think that like Dr. Kanakis was mentioning, historically, the dark blue background with the yellow kind of front was because of the fact that the technology at the time made that the most easily identifiable stuff. And so I think now it is possible that if your projection is over very large screens in a small room, that the glow of the white to the audience can be kind of jarring. And so you're kind of using like a lighter color in the background might be great. So I think that there's no best. But I think for me personally, it's usually a dark banner, a white background and a dark colored font. And so I think that the question for the polling, you know, there are some. Dr. Kanakis, did you address this already? Sorry, when I was playing around with IGPT, I did. I talked about Paul Levy, but there's other there are the ones and most of those, Stephen, are free, right? This idea that you can effectively, you know, use individuals phones and like they typically text a particular number and like then, you know, and then they get a link based on that link. You can do live polling, which we could probably could have done even here as well. Paul Levy. Perfect. Thank you so much. Any other questions? OK, if there's no other questions on behalf of Dr. Kanakis and I and ASCP, I remember that, you know, your input is very helpful and you can actually go to the ASCP store and claim the CME and CME credit. That this was recorded so you can access this again. And on behalf of us, thank you for your attention. And hopefully you will have mastered visual mastery. Cheers. Thank you.

medical presentations

visual language

audience accessibility

interactive elements

ChatGPT

Poll Everywhere

design principles

CME credit

educational content