Art of Medicine
Sep 2018
Abstract
The Precision Portrait is a mixed-media portrait illustrating the future of precision medicine and its ethical challenges.
Figure. The Precision Portrait, Close-Up View
Figure. The Precision Portrait, Full View
Media
Oil painting on aluminum digital illustration.
Caption
The portrait foreground features a child, represented in buttery oil paint with enumerable brushstrokes and subtleties in color. This hand-painted portrait sits atop an aluminum digital illustration depicting lab values, DNA sequences, EKG strips, and excerpts from a health record. With ever more clinical data at our disposal, new tools can help improve decision making and craft targeted approaches for the care of each patient. The Precision Portrait seeks to remind current and future physicians that our patients are more than collections of data to be input into the next machine-learning algorithm. Each data point represents a grandmother, a teacher, an artist, or someone’s child.
