Alexander Tsiaras

Founder and CEO, Anatomical Travelogue, Inc.

Visual Anatomy: The Human Body Unplugged

The conference room of Alexander Tsiaras' office in Manhattan's trendy Tribeca district is lined with picture frames—but the photos aren't of Tsiaras' kids or wife or dog.

There's one of a fetus, another of the bones of the foot. There's one of the brainstem—Tsiaras' own—and another of the bones of his face. Then there's a series showing identical images of a baby exiting the birth canal, each picture rendered with a different artistic finish, ranging from silver matte to near-psychedelic—what Andy Warhol might have produced if he had worked in a delivery room.

Tsiaras' company, Anatomical Travelogue, is a pioneer in illustrating the intricate details of the human body in images that are at once high-tech, anatomically faithful and artistically striking—the ultimate "insider art," he jokes.

Tsiaras isn't a doctor; he's a photographer, technologist and visionary with an expert knowledge of anatomy and a passion for the human form. The books he has produced—including From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed, The InVision Guide to a Healthy Heart and The InVision Guide to Sexual Health — have spawned educational videos and exhibits at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The images are 'visualizations' that Tsiaras and his team create using full-body scans, ultra-powerful microscopes and molecular modeling tools that allow him to illustrate the body in vivid detail, for both 3-D pictures and animations. He has described his work as "'Fantastic Voyage' meets the TIME-LIFE book series."

Some see Tsiaras as a digital-age Leonardo da Vinci, whose anatomical renderings set the standard for centuries. But Tsiaras describes himself in more prosaic terms.

"Most of this is just about information," he says. "I look at myself as a storyteller who works with artists and technologists."

Tsiaras, 52, is largely self-educated, recounting proudly that he was tossed out of seven colleges. The son of Greek immigrants, he returned to Greece at age 19 and spent six months herding goats in the country's mountainous north. With artistic training as a painter and sculptor, he took photographs on his trip that he later turned into his first book, on Greek funerary customs.

Back in the States, Tsiaras visited an older brother, renowned opthamologist (and fellow BIF-2 storyteller) William Tsiaras, and was struck by what he considered the inherent drama of the X-ray images in his lab. He began photographing and writing about his brother's eye surgery, which led him into a career as an award-winning science photojournalist—at the same time as he was training for a possible berth on Greece's Olympic track and field team.

In the late 1980s, when Tsiaras got his first glimpse of scans from CT and MRI machines—the ultimate cameras—he had found his life's calling. Teaching himself several programming languages, he set about creating software that would allow him to "paint" the human body using data-rich digital images.

His work lends itself not just to books and television programming; Nike hired Anatomical Travelogue to produce animated spots revealing the anatomy of a golfer's swing, and drug companies like Amgen and Pfizer are using the company's simulations to show how new drugs work at the molecular level.

Anatomical Travelogue is growing rapidly—it's now at 60 employees and has amassed what Tsiaras says is the largest library of high-resolution volume data on the body in the world—and Tsiaras believes its future is limitless.

"After celebrity, health is the big thing in America. It's a $1.7 trillion industry, and only 10 percent of that is spent on information," he says. "We want to become the premier health and wellness storytellers in the world, and take over that space"—like Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' movie special effects company, he says.

In recent years, Tsiaras says, big pharmaceutical companies have been hoping to do more with their profits, especially in the areas of disease prevention. "People are fed up with the fact that more money is being put into [health and pharmaceutical] lobbying than into education," he says. That's where Anatomical Travelogue comes in.

"We're great storytellers, in a category that everybody now wants to know about," he says. "We've become kind of the soup de jour to explain health to the media and to the world. The wants and the needs are coming together."