“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release his records via his website — to maintain his sense of humanity.

“Your life really does change. It becomes a procedure,” says Iaconesi in this powerful talk. “You cease to exist because you become a patient. In more than one way, you’re not a human being any more. You’re replaced by your clinical records. Yes, those records are talking about you, but they’re really not talking about you. They talk about some of your body parameters, but their language is different than the language of human beings.”

In this talk, Iaconesi outlines the staggering results of reaching out to the world for cures: 600 poems, 35 videos, 15,000 email conversations and counting. The New Scientist recently created a gallery of some of the artistic “cures” that Iaconesi has received, including a sculpture of his brain tumor created in Second Life by artist Patrick Lichty and a performance piece created by Francesca Fini inspired by the magnets used in brain scanning.

Iaconesi tells The New Scientist that the response from medical professionals has been exciting, too. “I have been able to become an expert in neurosurgery and neurology. Through this kind of complete openness, I could access thousands of people who have provided me with their knowledge, their skills, their testimonies, their life experiences,” he tells the magazine. “Roughly 60 neurologists, neurosurgeons and radiologists contacted me suggesting techniques for surgery and for treatment. They are even talking to each other.”

One of the medical professionals who has been most helpful is TED Fellow Jimmy Lin of the Rare Genomics Institute. As it turns out, Lin is the geneticist who did the first genome sequencing for the very type of brain cancer that Salvatore has, glioblastoma.

Iaconesi recently reached out to Lin with good news — that the latest magnetic resonance imaging shows that the tumor is not growing and that he might be a good candidate for radical surgery. Lin offered to give a second opinion, and has also volunteered to help Iaconesi sequence the genome of his tumor after surgery, in an open source platform.

Overall, Iaconesi says that all the input — artistic, personal and medical — has helped him created his plan for treatment. “It’s a strategy that goes around the world and across thousands of years of culture,” says Iaconesi in his TEDx talk. “No one commiserates with me — no one is sad, and everyone is doing something. And most important of all, everyone involved is really feeling part of the human society. This is a good use for technology.”

For more reading about Iaconesi and the open-sourcing of his cure:

• My open source cure for brain cancer, CNN
• Crowd-sourcing a cure for cancer through the internet, BBC News
• Italian Internet Users Want to Help Heal Cancer, Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paolo
• Thousands of Opinions Can Also Have Risks, Folha de Sao Paolo
• The Story of Salvatore Iaconesi Could Become Law, Wired Italy
• The Cures, written by a friend of Salvatore’s for Huffington Post Healthy Living
• Geeks and Dreamers in Rome Believe in the Future, Italy’s la Reppublica

In early September, data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi announced to the world that he had brain cancer. And he refused to let his medical records stay sealed. “They were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life,” he explained on his website. “I cracked them. I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone.” He asked anyone with a “cure,” be it a medical treatment or “a video, an artwork, a map, a text, a poem, a game,” to send it his way.

The outpouring of support Iaconesi has received through his website has been tremendous, and he is posting every cure he has received — 300 so far — by mapping them on the image above. Many of the responses have come from those with medical expertise; Iaconesi tells Wired Italy he has heard from “about 60 doctors, including surgeons and experts in neuroradiology. [Of] about 40 of these, we also talked about their former patients or family members of patients.”

But Iaconesi’s openness is having other ripple effects too. Last week in Italy, four deputies of the Democratic Party presented Iaconesi’s initiative to the Ministry of Health, asking them to consider the possibility of releasing all Italian citizens’ clinical data in a fully open format. “The digitization of health information is a useful tool because it cancels distance and time, allowing sick people to reach — potentially — anyone, anywhere,” the ministers write of their initiative.

Late last week, Iaconesi made a surprise appearance at TEDxTransmedia, at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and dedicated to the theme of “Dreamers, Geeks, Mindshifters.” Iaconesi’s talk will be available on YouTube shortly.

And tomorrow, he will present an installation, performance and talk on open data at the Internet Festival in Pisa.

On Iaconesi’s website, take a look at the section “A Random Cure” to check out the videos, photos, letters of encouragement and medical ideas that Iaconesi has received. As you load cures, watch how they toggle on Iaconesi’s beautiful map, creating a web of possibility.