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[MUSIC]

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LAUREN: Hello and welcome to Stories of Openness,

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a limited series podcast created by the Open Education team at Deakin University Library.

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My name is Lauren Halcomb-Smith and I'm your host.

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I'm a lecturer of Open Education at Deakin,

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and I'm on a mission to learn about the impact that Open Educational Resources,

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or OER, are having on learning and teaching at Deakin University.

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OER are free textbooks and other learning materials that anyone can use,

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adapt, and share, which is unlike traditional textbooks that can be expensive,

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and limited by copyright and licensing restrictions.

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In this series, I'm talking with Deakin academics as they share their stories of creating

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and using Open Resources. This podcast is part of a research project that uses

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podcasting as a research methodology, so this conversation is both a podcast and open research data.

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I'm coming to you today from the beautiful, traditional, and unceded lands of the Boonwurrung people.

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I gratefully acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of these lands,

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seas, and skies, and recognise that this has been a place of learning,

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teaching, and rich conversation for millennia.

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My guest today is Cailin Mellberg from Deakin's Faculty of Health.

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Cailin is an osteopath and lecturer of anatomy in the School of Medicine,

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and the lead creator of one of our newest OER, the SPATIAL Project,

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an open educational resource designed to improve student access to a digital body donor,

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which is presented in cross-sections to support teaching anatomy within the School of Medicine.

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This resource is a database of more than 100,000 reconstructed cross-sectional slices

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of the human body presented as images, videos, and interactive files.

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This is a very cool OER, and I have been looking forward to this conversation

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since I first met Cailin last year. Welcome, Cailin.

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CAILIN: Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure.

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LAUREN: We're going to jump in, Cailin. I know we have a lot to cover because this is such a fascinating

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piece of work. Could you tell us the story of how you came to create this OER?

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CAILIN: Absolutely. The goal of the anatomy program is ultimately to develop a usable mental model

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of the human body that health practitioners can then use to actually solve real world problems.

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So, a huge amount of time is invested within any anatomy curriculum to help students develop

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those mental models and mental pictures. Overall, when we're thinking about the development of

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those things, we're not talking about factual recall. A lot of learning that students try to do

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to pass exams and do other things is often this text-based remember tables, remember this,

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remember something else. But anatomy is slightly different in that we really need this usable

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model within our minds.
LAUREN: Yeah, that makes sense.
CAILIN: That usable model needs to be able to be

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manipulated within three-dimensional space to then help us solve real world problems. So,

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whether you're performing a clinical examination and appreciating what structures are underneath the

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skin as you're palpating different structures, whether you are injecting a needle or taking

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blood or doing something along those sorts of lines or whether you're engaging in any sort of

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surgical operation of any sort. You need to know what's underneath the skin before you start.

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This is probably one of the greatest and most difficult challenges for students studying

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anatomy to not just get through the language barriers that are there, learning lots of new words,

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and to get through learning of different structures, but actually developing this mental map.

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In order to, I guess, get to the point where we have this mental model, there's lots of different

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tools and resources that we try and use as educators. And some of them are really quite cool,

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like we have lectures and online materials as most people have, but there's also a whole heap of

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practical classes that students engage in as well. So, within the practical classes, students have

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got access to life-sized anatomical models of legs and arms and torsos.
LAUREN: Cool!
CAILIN: Yeah, like genuinely awesome,

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you can remove parts and kind of look at them from the front, look at them from the back, and we have

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all sorts of 3D printed hearts and lungs and brains and other things. And that's been a pretty cool

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project in and of itself, where we spray painted them with whiteboard paint so that you can draw

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and then just rub off and draw again. So, students can actually draw on like the coronary circulation

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of the heart, where all those little vessels are going around and how they're actually supplied,

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and for the brain draw on the different regions and lobes of the brain and colour them in and then

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rub them out or draw over the top of them to show the vascular supply is relative to it.

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LAUREN: Interesting. What else do you have?
CAILIN: We also have some animal dissections that students

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participate in so they get to dissect certain animal parts to look at the similarities and differences

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between that and the human bodies that they're working with. Within the collection, we also have

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potted specimens and human body donors which are used to support teaching. Overall,

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really, really cool set of things and a really robust set of teaching resources to try and support

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the learning, but there's also a lot of barriers. Historically, if you look at medical programs over

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a long period of time and across schools of medicine, the actual amount of face-to-face time that

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schools across the world have to teach anatomy has basically been declining continuously over a

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long period of time and being replaced by digital learning opportunities, online experiences,

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and just less overall face-to-face time. This kind of leaves us with this challenge of

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a world that is moving into a digital space and even though we have these physical resources,

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we don't have the time. We just physically don't have time with students. There's fairly strict

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rules and regulations about the amount of like the use of the lab space that we have students that

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sometimes miss workshops because they have illness or injury. We have students who have mental

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health challenges at different points in time and arrive not ready to learn or just unable to

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participate at different points in time. There's also low levels of formaldehyde that are associated

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with some of the body donors that we have within our space and that can sometimes be a barrier for

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some people who have sensitivity to formaldehyde or a pregnant and choose to not participate in those

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sets of activities. We also have students that are traveling long distances and we're now delivering

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at least for the medical program across multiple sites. So we have a site at Waurn Ponds, we have a

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site at Ararat and we have a site at Warrnambool. And so although Waurn Ponds is fairly well resourced with

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lots of different things, we're still building the resource sets at Ararat and Warrnambool as well.

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LAUREN: So what I'm hearing is there are a number of really great resources out there but they

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aren't accessible to many of your students for reasons of cost, geography or whatever. So how did

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you get from that point to creating an OER?
CAILIN: So one of the big impetuses for us looking at this was

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to try and develop some resources that allowed all of these really major components of our medical

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programs to have more access or better access to some resources to support them in a journey where

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a lot of that journey is done independently and a lot of that journey is needing to be done in some

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sort of a digital space. That kind of is a bit of the background for where we were before we

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kicked everything off. The team then looked at what we could do to solve the problem and so we looked

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to what resources were available and although there's an absolute stack of resources out there,

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some examples that we looked at were things like Complete Anatomy, which is a digital modelling

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of the human body that you can rotate in real space, you can augment it and look at it sitting

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on your desk through your phone, you can do some all sorts of amazing things with it and being a

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reconstruction of a human body from a digital standpoint, you can turn things off, turn things on,

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hide things, really great for learning, they've also got some videos and other things but there's

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some significant barriers that go to it. The first of the major barriers is cost. You need to get a

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per student subscription to actually participate and have access to that and one of the other major

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barriers is it presents a white male human in their healthy middle ages.
LAUREN: Great...
CAILIN: Which just doesn't

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reflect really what we're trying to help medical students to understand and those within the

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faculty of health, most of the patients that they work with, they're not healthy white males in their

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prime. The vast majority of people are their patients, they're people from all sorts of ethnicities,

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all sorts of age groups, all sorts of different demographics. Great resources but didn't quite hit

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the mark for where we were and we just didn't have the funds to go that way. There's also

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numerous other things that we'd previously used. An@tomedia had been a great resource but

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the publisher that had looked after and housed An@tomedia previously found that An@tomedia

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was no longer economically viable and so they no longer hosted the resource and so the resource

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ended up with a different form of publication. In that process, the university now no longer

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is able to get like an appropriate corporate membership that works. And so again a great resource but

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no longer accessible to students. The other sorts of things that are there are just frightfully

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expensive from Sectra tables to the IMAIOS.
LAUREN: What kind of numbers are we talking about here? That

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really cool program that you were talking about before that needed a per student subscription.

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Do you remember how much that subscription would be per student?
CAILIN:  It depends on whether you're getting

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a full price subscription or a student subscription.
LAUREN: Okay.
CAILIN:  I think the figures we were looking at were

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around about $99 per student they're about. By the time you're getting that for the number of

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students across the School of Medicine that becomes fairly frightfully expensive fairly quickly,

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we also looked at the Sectra tables, which again are a fantastic resource. We have to spend I don't

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know $75,000 to buy a series of tables that you can put in a room and then you have to pay a

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subscription to the services which again is thousands of dollars per year, maybe $30,000 for the

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school per year.
LAUREN: And that's a physical table which wouldn't address some of those challenges you

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were talking about regional and remote students.
CAILIN: Correct. Very cool, it does solve some problems,

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it doesn't solve other problems. In reality, we also probably needed to consider more tables to

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actually support all the different spaces which students are moving through and to give opportunity

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for all the students to actually get access to what they needed. The idea that came with this OER

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was really to say okay we need a resource that actually addresses these problems as best we

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possibly can. We'd already many many years ago developed some very basic cross-sectional images

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utilizing some of the Visible Human Project images that were obtained courtesy of the Visible

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Human Project from the national US National Library of Medicine. So these are some publicly available

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cross-sections of a body donor that were taken in the 90s. Those cross-sections are available for

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download and we initially set out and just put a couple of those cross-sections in power points

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and found that students were really engaging with those. We initially did a joint project with

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Barwon Medical Imaging, Barwon Health and the Medical Imaging teams at Deakin to do a small pilot

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to actually take some MRIs of the body and we went and labelled them all. And students have actually

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loved that. There's so many ways in which that's already been integrated from when we first did that

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project but the thing that was missing was to have the whole donor available and there's a big jump

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from learning anatomy to jumping into medical imaging which requires you to appreciate how the colours

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and shapes and things shift a little bit because each type of specific medical imaging that's done

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has different shades of whites and greys that go with it. The cross-sections of the body donors

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actually retain their actual colours of the human tissue that make it slightly easier for students

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to transition their learning from the structures they're looking at on paper to actually seeing

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those sections even when they're in cross-section to go  oh well I can see that that would be this organ

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because it's that colour . Beyond other things as well so particularly for that early transition and

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that early learning into that cross-section anatomy space we just found that those very basic

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in PowerPoint drop images were fantastic and we said what can we do with this?

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I collaborated with the deputy course director of the medical imaging program at Deakin University

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and the two of us set out on a well probably a six-year journey really by the time you take into

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account from when we were first thinking about these to when we actually got it up and running

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but we're very appreciative in 2024 to get a grant to actually take these cross-sectional images

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yeah we chose the female donor although there is a male donor that you can use as well

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we really wanted to represent as much diversity as we could within this space so we took an elderly

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female donor that was again those images that we referenced at the very beginning the Visible

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Human Project courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine and there's approximately 5,140

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slices that have been taken that are approximately give or take around about one millimetre apart

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all the way through the whole body and it depends exactly on where you go there's some of more like

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point three of a mil, some of them are more like a mil, but basically that's what you've got through

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the whole body. We realized that if you stack these on top of one another, there's enough information

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per slice to actually create voxels or these 3D boxes of information that mean that you can then

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represent the image as a three-dimensional structure not just a two-dimensional plane. We used

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some fancy software and managed to actually pull together all of these 5,140 slices and recreate

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this virtual donor. Not just in an axial set of images, which is how they were originally presented,

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but also in all the different planes of the body. So if you think about like an X, Y and Z axis,

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you've now got these planes of images in each of those three dimensions or each of those three

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things so one breaks the body into sort of a top and a bottom which would be sort of our transverse

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or axial plane. One's breaking it into a left and a right which is like a sagittal plane you can

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look into, and one's breaking it into sort of a front and a back which is our coronal plane that

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you can then scroll through the human body. But I guess the other thing that we wanted was we wanted

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students to explore that was one of the key pedagogical things that we found by having these

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unlabelled images students were engaged in trying to find the things that we were talking about

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during lectures and during our workshops. What we ended up doing on that front is we looked to

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the medical imaging space and we used some of the software that's in medical imaging already to

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create what they call DICOM files. Yeah but basically MRIs and CTs take these cross-sectional

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images and then they reconstruct them so that you can see them in different planes. There's already

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technology and programs that exist to do this and so we basically used some of these programs

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not the way they were intended ever to be used and managed to with a lot of toying within

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using the maybe not the way they were first intended to actually produce these complete 3D

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reconstructions of the body and from that we were able to output all of the different sections

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in all of the different planes for all of the different regions and we made sure that we segmented

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the different things. So there is a scout image of the whole body that you can do so you can literally

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do the entire body in any of the three planes at once in all three planes. But we also used

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radiographic collimation so we aligned all of the segmentations that we did to the radiographic

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standards so if you look at an MRI CT the actual set of images that you would have for the SPATIAL

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Project will align perfectly with that same set of images that come through from our project as well.

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So hopefully they can be used to help students actually interpret what they might be looking at

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when they introduce to the different types of images and scans across those different

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sections.
LAUREN: How long have students had access to the resource?
CAILIN: The students themselves have had

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access to a very very very basic PowerPoint for a few years that we've been trailing. But the SPATIAL

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project became available in May and so they have only had a very short period of time. In May they

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moved into their examination period out the other side of exams we've then promoted it at the

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start of this semester to teaching within the space of only a few weeks of using this within the

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Deakin spaces. We've had really significant uptake of people interested in actually looking at

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the resource and downloading the files and engaging with them which has just been fantastic. There's

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been over a thousand views and over 5,000 downloads in the space of a few weeks.
LAUREN: In a few weeks.

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Are you hearing any stories from the students themselves about how they're using it

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and what they're doing with it, what it's like for them?
CAILIN: Students have the opportunity. We have

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a fancy computer that we have within the lab space that's able to take all of the images and

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make them interactive. So rather than just having files that you can scroll through in the three

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different planes, you can represent all three at the exact same time. And so the actual crosshair

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in one image will line up to the exact crosshair in the next image and the one after. So you're getting,

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you can pinpoint in all three planes simultaneously where you are in the body. And as you scroll in one,

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it'll automatically adjust the other two which is the benefit of using DICOM files in the first place.

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LAUREN: Okay.
CAILIN: So students have been doing this and utilising this in the actual workshops and there's

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those aha and wow moments that just come through every single session. And one of the biggest

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challenges is just getting students through the actual station because the students that are just

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lined up and then sitting around in groups talking over some of the things that they're finding and

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trying to apply week by week the learnings to what's actually happening in that space. Then

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having been able to provide them with access to these files outside of the space, I am left guessing

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as to exactly how that's been utilised. But students anecdotally are coming in having downloading

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different files and asking about the different file types that are available within that space as well.

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LAUREN: So it sounds like you're seeing a fairly strong amount of engagement.
CAILIN: Absolutely.
LAUREN: Now how many

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students would you say go through this program per year?
CAILIN: If you're looking at the medical program,

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the medical program have approximately 150 students per cohort and that can go up and down depending

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on year level.
LAUREN: Okay.
CAILIN: You then have medical imaging which are high users of this which have closer

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to 70 to 100 sort of students per year level passing through.
LAUREN: Okay.
CAILIN: And so the number of

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vews and downloads for a relatively small starting space is fairly high engagement.

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LAUREN: So you said 150 and then 75 to 100 so approximately 225 to 50 students per cohort.

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CAILIN: Correct.
LAUREN: And then tell me those numbers again the downloads and the visits.

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CAILIN: We've had approximately a thousand views and approximately 5,000 downloads of the project so far.

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LAUREN: Wow. In like three weeks.
CAILIN: Thereabouts. Yep.
LAUREN: And then you're observing this excitement and engagement

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in the classroom. Any other stories that you're hearing in terms of the impact this is having

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on learners?
CAILIN: When we went to look at how we're going to present the database, one of the big things

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that we spent a lot of time thinking about was how to actually address the problems that we had

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at the beginning of the whole project.
LAUREN: Yeah.
CAILIN: The file types within the project. We have PDF files

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that are about 100 megabytes that will run on any smart device full stop. We have individual

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JPEG files, which are just those little image files that you can go and download one by one,

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which are a little bit annoying because you kind of got to download stacks and do whatever

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else with them. But they're great if you want to pull out an image to add into your into your notes

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that are is a really relevant image to something or if you wanted to produce a lecture or do something

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else, you can go and grab the individual image files. We also have video files so students can actually

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scroll through video files and then obviously the interactive diagram files which require a little

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bit more processing power on your computer. They're quite large files and they make up the vast

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majority of the size of the database, which is well over 100 gigabytes of which the vast vast

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majority are just those interactive file types. Because there are all of those file types sitting

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there that are so easily accessible and so able to be stored on even the most basic devices,

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it just makes it easy, it makes it accessible and it breaks down any barrier that people would have

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or that students would have to just not having access to some of these things. We're hearing

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just through talking with students that they have really appreciated having things available

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that load fast, that are authentic and engaging and appropriate and allow them to continue to engage

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with their learning outside of these really tight, dedicated learning opportunities week by week.

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LAUREN: Very cool. You know what I was thinking earlier when you were talking about where you got these images

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from. It's like a super open education project because you've taken openly licensed images from

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another resource and then you've adapted them into your new resource, which is really the essence

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of open education. What was it like for you as a teacher going through this open education project?

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CAILIN: There's been a bit of a journey from the very first OER that we put together with the

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GRAD Companion and then moving into this project, the SPATIAL Project. I guess for me philosophically,

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this lines up perfectly with a lot of my beliefs and philosophies about teaching and pedagogy anyway,

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but what I actually found is that the team and there's a big shout out to Angie Williamson

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who brought together people at the very beginning of this and has just continued to be supportive

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and help students and staff actually find each other and develop networks. I guess also to other

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people that have been brought into the space like copyright team and digital learning futures.

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And so through exposure to lots of other people doing OERs and through the networks that have been

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established, it's helped me individually develop my own understanding of what OER is. It's shaped

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the way that I go about creating resources for the students that I look after in my own units

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and areas that I teach, but that also translates beyond that to the conversations that you have

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when you're sitting in course and curriculum meetings and the ways in which you look at addressing

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some of the barriers that students might be having to curriculum across the whole program.

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For me, there's benefits in OER and in bypassing publishing barriers and making it better for

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students, but it's also the broad of curricular impacts that can happen beyond those that are

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just doing the OER side of things.
LAUREN: Can you give me some examples about how going through this

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experience and learning more about OER from other OER creators has informed decisions that you've

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made sort of outside this project?
CAILIN: Yeah, absolutely. When we look at developing curriculum for students,

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a lot of the time, the curriculum, the image sets and the other things that we would use for

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students or the resources that we would use for students have been ones where sometimes there's

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been barriers to access. One of the resources that has been the primary textbook that we've used

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for a very long time has been Moore's Clinically Orientated Anatomy and there's not a digital version of that

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that's available through the library. Students would regularly end up having to purchase the

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physical textbook for that or needing to find people who had a copy of the textbook or an old version.

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The actual resource itself is an excellent resource. It's a really good textbook that's a nice

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balance between too much and too little. It really is a fantastic resource to have, which is hence

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why it was actually the prescribed text for the unit. But long-term looking at the viability of

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our programs, wherever we can, we're looking to reduce the requirement for students to

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need those resources to complete the units and that bridges beyond just what we're doing

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individually as teachers that bridges into the conversations that you're having about what

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resources are we actually expecting students to need to download or have access to. What ways can

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they make sure that they're able to complete this program and this unit if they don't have access

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to those sorts of resources. It just has enabled conversations around those different ideas and

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topics and lots of different ways in which I think from where things were 10 or 15 years ago or

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probably even less even 5 years ago, there has been a significant shift. I think COVID has helped

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that a lot, although the pandemic as we discussed just briefly before this podcast has had all sorts

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of impacts, all sorts of impacts on people's lives. One of the things that was a nice by-productive

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COVID was that lots of people made a lot of their teaching and learning activities more open

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and there were lots of benefits of that that have been retained out the other side of COVID as well

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and so it's actually become more possible than ever before to be more open. Yeah. With already a

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little bit of awareness in that space, you can start to make those choices actively individually

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and as a team to continue to build better outcomes for students across the board.
LAUREN: I'm loving this

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story that you just told about the anatomy textbook and just to clarify that's a completely separate

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piece of work to the SPATIAL Project that we're talking about. The OER you've just published.
CAILIN: Correct.

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LAUREN: That's amazing. It sounds to me like the experience of writing and creating an OER and working through

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the OER program has shaped your teaching practice beyond this individual resource.
CAILIN: Absolutely.

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LAUREN: Are you hearing any stories about the impact that the SPATIAL Project is having outside of Deakin?

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I haven't had any contact or stories yet of the impact beyond Deakin. CAILIN: Matt and I are interested

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in presenting the SPATIAL Project and looking to continue to promote some of the work that we have

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done in this space. For those that want access to similar sorts of things, there are lots of

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different ways in which you can get access. You just need a lot of dollars for subscriptions to get

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there.
LAUREN: Not your resource.
CAILIN: Not our resource.
LAUREN: Comparable resources.
CAILIN: Comparable resources.
LAUREN: What's the

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number amount that you would need to get a comparable resource?
CAILIN: Well, I would have to have a quick

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look at the latest update, but IMAIOS is one of the types of resources that's out there. And IMAIOS

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in US dollars has a subscription fee that is in the US. I think it's 145 US dollars a month

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or thereabouts for things like that. Or through university things, once you buy

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tables, whether it's an Anatomage or Sectra or some of those things, the price per person is less,

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but you've had to invest in technology and it's still limited to different spaces. So yeah,

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free, open and we want to keep it that way.
LAUREN: So while you haven't necessarily heard in the eight

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or fewer weeks since your resource has been released, it sounds like you anticipate that the

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resource could have significant impact, especially for potential institutions that don't have access

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to $60,000 - $100,000 for comparable resources.
CAILIN: Absolutely. And I think for us, the fact that we've now

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shared this in a public space. And that's been one of the biggest barriers to this project. It was

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about a terabyte worth of data that we were trying to host and have access that was publicly

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available. So there were a lot of IT barriers and then a lot of hosting barriers that we ran into.

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But we have managed to make a few adjustments to what we've shared and how we've gone about it

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to get, make sure that we've got the most important parts of it sitting there. And that's been shared

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on Figshare. So is now open to anybody who'd like to download that particular resource. Internationally,

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there's lots of different opportunities beyond Australia and also within Australia for people that

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are teaching health practitioners anatomy and want to improve their spatial awareness to start

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engaging with these particular types of learning tools. We would love to see this project continue

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and we'd love to see the project be developed into something where we develop some learning

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activities. We've done a lot of work with students where we've built some pedagogy around

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how we're using these images to develop spatial awareness within class already. So there's already

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established curriculum that is linked to this. It would be wonderful in the future to actually

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say okay well here's a database but here is also some best practice examples of how we've currently

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used this in some of the different circumstances across different programs at Deakin University as well.

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So watch this space.
LAUREN: Another OER perhaps.
CAILIN: Hopefully.
LAUREN: What do you think all of this means? Like we've

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been talking now for a little while about the experience of creating an OER, the impact that it's

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had on learners in the last sort of amount of time since it's been released, the impact that

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the experience has had on you. Almost in sort of like an auto ethnographic moment, what do you think

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your stories tell us about the impact of OER more broadly?
CAILIN: If the question is around what can we learn?

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I think that funding for these initiatives is so important to get things started. There's lots of

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people that have got great ideas but having that little bit of funding can push these little ideas

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that lots of people have across the line into actually becoming projects.
LAUREN: Yeah.
CAILIN: There's then I guess

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if there's a learning point it's making sure that you have the time and willingness to persist with

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whatever OER you take on. This particular project has been a lot of time and a lot of passion has

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gone into the creation of this and I think talking to lots of people who are OER creators unlike

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some of the big grants where people can put on research assistants and have lots of support to do

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the work. The funding for this is still fairly limited and relies on people investing time at this point

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to actually produce these projects but what comes out of it is so valuable and the impacts that

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you then have out the other side of beyond the actual OER resource which is created into having

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people develop their own pedagogy and that pedagogy then having impacts across others within their

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teams and others within whole programs as well as a resource that then becomes open indefinitely

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for time for others to build on and continue to develop and co-create really further things

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that come out of it. I think one of the other learnings is that the overall the benefits are

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disproportional and what I mean by that is those that have money or a lot of money and are able to

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buy these resources they're able to actually get access to things that may be comparable in different

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way shapes and forms that maybe have the context or have the resource. And so the

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disproportional benefits is actually the whole point of the OER in the first place, that it is

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available to all but the benefits actually come often to those minority groups and those who

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probably need it most. And so those disproportional benefits are a real thing that all teachers should

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look at carefully within their programs. Just recognising that OER has lasting impact so it's

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that lasting impact from the experiences of actually engaging with it and then from the resources

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and the ways that that then unfolds over time. So that'd be my big learnings out of an OER project.

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LAUREN: Amazing. Are there any other stories that you'd like to share or anything that I haven't asked you

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about?
CAILIN: Not specifically I'm very open to having all sorts of questions. I would highly encourage anyone

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who's interested in exploring the human body to consider particularly for a health professional

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because that's really what these were targeted at to go and actually explore what's underneath your

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skin and think about how different structures are related. You can do this from any starting point.

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The whole idea of this project is that it meets you wherever you are in your learning journey so if

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you know that the heart and the lungs are located in the thorax in your chest cavity you can just go

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and look at the chest cavity and be like well I know there's a heart and the lungs in here

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and go and find hearts and lungs or if you're you know a final medical school student and you have

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this really specific interest in tracing the thoracic duct which is this really tiny little

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lymphatic tube that goes between the abdomen up through the thorax to the drain at the left

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venous angle you can actually using these images start to trace some of these really intricate

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structures and consider their relationships to the azygos vein and the descending thoracic aorta

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and look at their relationship to the mediastinum, some of these other structures. Although

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there's a lot of words there, the point of it is that if you have an idea of something and you can

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see it or find it you can then go and actually explore it and look at how it's then related to

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everything else within those spaces in such a powerful sort of way.
LAUREN: My very last question, just

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for fun, do you have a favourite part of the OER?
CAILIN: I don't think I have a particular favourite. There's

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been a lot of time and energy that's gone into different parts of the project and I think that my

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favourite moment yeah maybe more so than a particular section was when we finally, after an

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ungodly amount of time and I cannot tell you how long it took to get this actually happening,

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but we managed to reconstruct the whole body in all three planes simultaneously and make it

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interactive at once. The amount of data required like the raw file that we were using from the Visible

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Human Project was around about 130 gigabytes of data.
LAUREN: Wow.
CAILIN: It's a very big file to start with and

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then once you're trying to take that file and hold all of that in memory simultaneously to then

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create different cross sections at once. It's a huge amount of information that you need a lot of

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processing power for and we were under underdone from a technology standpoint and we're relying on

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computers really exceeding their capacities to deliver this project for us. It was a really

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nice moment when we finally pulled all of that together and we managed to actually, for the first

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Time, visualise the scattered images of the whole human body in all three planes simultaneously. We're

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able to scroll and explore and rotate. That for us I think is definitely a memory and a moment that

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Matt and I will both take with us at the other side of this project. LAUREN: Amazing. Well, congratulations,

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Cailin. I'm going to wrap us up with some credits but before I do I just want to say thank you again

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so much for coming and sharing your stories. We first met over a year ago when you were still in

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the process of finalising the resource and putting it all together and it's one of the projects that

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has stuck in my mind for all the reasons that you've described and I've learned so much, so thankyou.

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CAILIN: Absolutely. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
LAUREN: Stories of Openness is a limited series

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from the Open Education team at Deakin University Library. It's part of a research by podcast project

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led by me Lauren Halcomb-Smith with Angie Williamson, Danni Johnson and Eddie Pavuna. We choose

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open wherever possible including Audacity for editing, Castopod for Hosting and Music

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by Scott Holmes Music. This podcast by Deakin University is licensed under a CC by MC 4.0 license.

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For more information and full acknowledgments please see our show notes. Thank you for listening

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and thank you again Cailin.

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