About the Atlas
Why we started, who writes the entries and how we keep them accurate.
What is the AFP
The aim of this project is to leverage the expertise of content experts in medicine, art and education to develop an Atlas of Fetal Pathologies. Each entry is developed by Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellows*, pediatricians training to become neonatologists, using a Project Based Learning curriculum. The primary use of this Atlas is to supplement Fetal Consultations by neonatologists. It is digitally accessible, open access, downloadable and printable.
*some entries are developed by physicians training to subspecialize in medical fields adjacent to neonatology (e.g. MFM).
Why the Atlas exists
When a family learns their baby has a fetal diagnosis, the first thing they do is search online — and what they find is often frightening, technical or incomplete. The Atlas provides families a new standard of care: a succinct, illustrated explanation written for them, developed entirely by physicians.
How each entry is built
Entries are written by neonatal-perinatal medicine fellows as part of their training, under the mentorship of an institutional faculty mentor, informed by the science behind complex communication and fetal medicine. In this way, we help build a future workforce that has expertise in communication with families.
Entries are peer-reviewed in two cycles by members of the Children’s Hospitals Neonatal Consortium (CHNC) Fetal Therapy Focus Group. CHNC FTFG members are national content experts in MFM, Surgery or Neonatology. Each one is illustrated by a physician-illustrator, with a nuanced understanding in the complexities of medicine and visual communication. Former NICU parents are a key part of development and feedback. We look forward to future partnerships with parent advisory groups as members of the peer-review process.
Collaborators are recruited nationwide, across institutions, for the benefit of patient care, education, and experience. In exchange for their generous contributions of time and intellect towards the Atlas, all medical professionals involved gain the opportunity to learn from each other, build relationships across disciplines, and progress their individual academic missions.
What each entry includes
- What does my baby have?
- Why did this happen?
- How will my baby be supported at birth?
- References (3–5 peer-reviewed)
- What does this mean for my baby and family?
- What to expect at delivery?
- What does going home look like?
- Community resources for families
- Original illustrations
67
≤ 6th
2×
Funding & partners
The Incubator — Educational Grant 2026
CHNC — Content Experts recruited through the Fetal Therapy Focus Group
What the AFP values
Equity
It is critical to us that the AFP remain a free resource for providers at any institution to be able to use for the benefit of their patients’ care. We hope the AFP crosses institutional walls, traverses oceans, and makes its way into all the related critical conversations – from fetal specialists at academic institutions all the way to rural community care providers. Similarly, we empower parents to access this resource and use it to their benefit, with the guidance of their physicians so they can put this information to use for their unique clinical contexts. Our patients are diverse and deserve to see themselves reflected in the information they see. We thoughtfully develop our illustrations to be culturally competent and inclusive and publish entries at a 6th grade reading level, commonly used as the standard for health literacy. Moreover, we aim for a future where our illustrations are available with a diversity of facial features and skin tones, and where our writing is professionally translated into several languages.
Collaboration
The strength of collaboration in this project cannot be understated. We bring multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-modal education, leveraging the very best that fetal medicine and communication medicine can provide to help providers communicate and families learn. In this way, we grow our medical community. The least we can do for the dedication of our team is to protect their intellectual property. All collaborators maintain rights to the work they contribute.
Communication
It is part of our job as neonatologists and medical providers to communicate – difficult news, complex medicine, ambiguity – all in an unfamiliar, stressful context. That is how our families can learn and prepare for themselves, their families and their futures. To this aim, we are on a mission to teach not just about the evolving and dynamic world of fetal medicine, but the increasingly evidence-based science behind communication to the newest members of our professional community, subspecialists in training. Through a thoughtful curriculum built on principles of adult learning theory we partner with medical educators across the country to educate our trainees so they can educate our families. We believe communication skills can be taught, practiced, and refined. It is our responsibility to both trainees and families to do so. For ultimately, if our patients’ families do not understand what we have said, have we communicated at all?
Watch: an introduction
A short introduction to the Atlas of Fetal Pathologies — what it is and how families can use it.
The team
The people behind the scenes.
Namrita Odackal, DO
Mary Crume, MD
Project co-lead · UT Southwestern