Medical Animation News

These days, it's hard to avoid medical animation technology. It can seem like it's practically everywhere, from doctors' offices and hospital websites to the headlines of some of the most popular medical stories out there. Consider a recent article in MedPage Today, which featured a medical visualization explaining the benefits of tranexamic acid, a special clotting drug.

Created by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the medical animation is something of a last-ditch publicity effort by UK doctors, who are trying to increase physician and patient awareness of the medication.

The news source said that even though tranexamic acid is cheap to produce, easy to administer and proven to save lives in trauma situations, very few emergency room admittees are being given the life-saving drug.

Researchers told MedPage Today that, with luck, their 3D medical animation will change all that.

Tranexamic acid - also known by its brand name, Cyklokapron - is a clotting agent used to prevent severe blood loss during surgery, after a traumatic injury or even from an especially heavy menstrual period.

Though its mode of action is complex, tranexamic acid is intended to do one simple task - namely, to prevent the formation of plasmin, a protein that helps dissolve clots. In emergency situations, this effect can help slow blood loss, potentially saving lives.

How many people could benefit from this drug, you might ask? Ian Roberts, the head of the clinical team that created the medical animation, put things into perspective in an email he sent MedPage Today. He noted that when the UK special forces and the U.S. military found out about the utility of tranexamic acid in preventing trauma casualties, they immediately adopted its use.

"However, changing civilian medical care is another story, even though the use of this cheap drug could save 140,000 lives per year," Roberts told the news source.

He also expressed bafflement that such an inexpensive, useful drug could fall by the wayside. Roberts noted that pharmaceuticals manufacturers do not make a particularly hefty profit on tranexamic acid, which may be one reason why they have not promoted it.

Still, Roberts and his colleagues are committed to getting the word out - hence the creation of the minute-long 3D medical visualization, which cites the findings of the Clinical Randomization of an Antifibrinolytic in Significant Hemorrhage-2 (CRASH-2) trial.

Roberts was a part of this study. Its results, published in 2010, indicated that patients who were given tranexamic acid were 15 percent less likely to die from blood loss caused by injuries.

The new medical animation reflects this figure. In it, a transparent, cartoonish man is shown slowly losing blood, while a narrator notes the patient's dropping blood pressure. The man is then given a shot of tranexamic acid, after which his body's blood volume stabilizes.

While it is not your typical mechanism of action animation created by a pharmaceutical company, this video quickly and simply explains the benefits of the administration of the drug during an emergency. An unsigned editorial, which was released in the journal The Lancet the same day that the video was posted, described how a medical animation can be an exceptionally powerful publicity tool.

"The discordant juxtaposition of [a] cartoon-like character and death at its messiest will no doubt appeal to the South Park generation," the article reasoned. "If branded pens and sticky notes can boost prescription of blockbuster drugs (and we know that they can), there is every hope that a much greater reward can be reaped by patients whose doctors view this [medical] animation."

According to MedPage Today, Roberts and his fellow trauma experts created the 3D medical animation after a report estimated that just 3 percent of qualifying UK trauma patients were receiving tranexamic acid.

In the U.S., the widespread adoption of this substance could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that injuries account for nearly 35 million hospital visits each year. Perhaps more chilling is the number of Americans who don't have access to trauma centers within an hour of a serious injury - about 45 million, according to the agency.

That figure is equivalent to the populations of Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas combined.

Even in non-trauma situations, tranexamic acid has been proven to reduce the risk of death from blood loss. One of the earliest studies on the substance, a 1999 report published in the journal Drugs, found that the application of the drug among cardiac bypass patients reduced postoperative bleeding-related mortality by 40 percent.

However, promising figures don't appear to be enough to popularize tranexamic acid. With a little luck, medical animations may finally do the trick.

Amerra provides custom medical animations, medical illustrations and interactive medical software. For additional information please contact us at 1.888.9AMERRA or e-mail info@amerra.com.