Over the years of working on this project I've had to generate a photographs of actual prototypes for use in university news magazines or journal publications. The one above is one of my favorites and also the least scientific. If the frame of this photo were expanded just a bit, my finger could be seen holding the tip of the catheter prototype to create this dramatic twisting bend. This photo was really taken for my own enjoyment and was never meant to be anything scientific. Never the less, it has been used as a background on websites, software interfaces and posters relating to the catheter. I guess it quickly conveys the fantasy of a very maneuverable catheter.
This image is a much more honest semi-scientific result. It is an overlay of the catheter being controlled with electrical current while reaching around obstacles placed on a flat board. One consequence of the overlay is that it is tough to tell which pieces of catheter belong to which element of the overlay, giving the illusion that the catheter has three segments. I was hoping to create this image by exposing the same piece of film multiple times while I steered the catheter around. This did not create the effect that I was looking for so I ended overlaying the different positions with varying levels of opacity to give the illusion of movement. This one has also been a surprisingly long lived image and I think it still represents clearly what we are trying to do.
And finally, the image that we put in the university engineering magazine. I really wanted to make a clean looking image for the magazine but unfortunately only had some dirty old foam board to use as a background. The catheter itself was also an older prototype which had degraded in appearance after sitting out in the open for too long. In photoshop, I cleaned up the background to give it a more uniform tone and fiddled with the white balance to return the catheter to a more healthy looking hue. I also rotated the dime so that it would look like I had actually been paying attention to little details like that while taking the picture! The coin-curl is the classic pose for a catheter PR photo and I couldn't resist trying to recreate it here even though this particular prototype was not capable of tightly enclosing the coin. Perhaps a quarter or a dollar coin would have been a better choice.
And finally, the image that we put in the university engineering magazine. I really wanted to make a clean looking image for the magazine but unfortunately only had some dirty old foam board to use as a background. The catheter itself was also an older prototype which had degraded in appearance after sitting out in the open for too long. In photoshop, I cleaned up the background to give it a more uniform tone and fiddled with the white balance to return the catheter to a more healthy looking hue. I also rotated the dime so that it would look like I had actually been paying attention to little details like that while taking the picture! The coin-curl is the classic pose for a catheter PR photo and I couldn't resist trying to recreate it here even though this particular prototype was not capable of tightly enclosing the coin. Perhaps a quarter or a dollar coin would have been a better choice.
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