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The Visual Human Project
by Ellen Lewis, Ph.D.
While poking around on the Internet recently, I was intrigued upon discovering the Visual Human Project. This program, sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, is a heady attempt to create a detailed, three-dimensional, digital representation of the human body.
Cryosections, CT images, and MR images from cadavers have been acquired and integrated into a male and female image database. Sections were taken from the male at 1.0mm intervals and the female was sectioned at 0.33 mm intervals. Apparently, even the government realizes that females are the more complex of the species.
Whereas much of the database cannot be accessed without permission, and file sizes are prohibitively large, you can, just for fun, take a wild ride through sequential head-to-toe scans at the Visible Human Project web site "sampler gallery." Unfortunately, they may have lost some of their clinical audience with their departure from the standard radiological viewing orientation.
This example of the beauty of combining computers, cadavers, and Crayolas came from Dr. A. Pommert and colleagues at the University of Hamburg Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science in Medicine. Additional interactive anatomical figures and videos can be seen at their web site.
This project has great potential impact on medical teaching and has already been tested as a "virtual cadaver" for students of anatomy and neophyte surgeons. Could this mean an end to those terrible medical student cadaver jokes?
The current goals of the Visible Human Project include linking the images to text-based data (such as anatomical labels), thereby creating a visual-anatomical and textual-physiological multimodal compendium of the human body.
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