Micro Mapping

I have mapped a lot of things in my day but never an ankle! In the Fall, I wrote a blog entry about the value of being a generalist, a jack-of-all-trades; about the worth of the ability to use knowledge acquired in one situation to help solve a seemingly unrelated problem. The events of this past week re-confirm my position in favour of having a jack-of-all-trades as part of every team.

Some of you may know that my daughter has had an ongoing issue with an ankle and that we have been working on finding solutions for many years now. The latest approach is to try to track a couple of nerves that seem to be causing the majority of the pain (we think) and, when we have found them, block them and thereby relieve her pain. We are working with an amazing doctor who is creative and caring, innovative and practical. He has access to some great tools, such as ultrasound, for locating nerves.

One of the problems, however, is keeping track of what has happened during past treatments. I am a visual guy, so I like to work with pictures and drawings. I also like things to be to scale. In the past, I’ve worked with air photos and have sometimes drawn on the photo those features that are not visible. I realized lately that the ankle situation was no different. We were trying to locate things (nerves) we could not easily see and then record their location for future reference. So what if I’d only previously done this with irrigation lines? Same thing, right?

So, I took a camera to this last treatment, and we photographed my daughter’s ankle before they started poking. She was able to define the edges of the effected area with colored pens, and we recorded which injection sites corresponded to the effected areas. A few more pictures and the raw data collection was complete.

Back at home, the data processing began. Many times I have used Autodesk software in ways the programmers never intended, and this was another instance. There are many programs that let you work with photos, but I wanted the results to be to scale, not merely a pretty picture with lines drawn on it. I wanted the doctor to be able to measure on paper and locate a needle-stick site on the ankle, for instance. By scaling the photo by reference length (the length of the scar; that won’t ever change) I had a drawing that is real-world size. Overlay the marked up photos onto the ankle and…voila!...an “as built” map of the effects of that session’s treatment.

With CAD, each treatment can be recorded on a unique layer, and a composite image can be viewed over time. I want to take a few more referencing pictures so the curvature of the leg can be accounted for with variable grid spacing. In other words, I want to create my own projection: the HAP (Heather’s Ankle Projection) Coordinated System. Okay, I have to quit writing now, because I think I just bent the needle on the geek meter!