The Visible Human Project is an attempt to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photos of the human body, to facilitate the application of anatomical visualization. It is used as a tool for the development of medical findings, where these findings link anatomy with its audience. The bodies of men and women were cut into thin slices which were then photographed and digitized. The project is run by the US National Medical Library (NLM) under the direction of Michael J. Ackerman. Planning began in 1986; the men's data set was completed in November 1994 and the women in November 1995. The project can be seen today at the National Museum of Health and Medicine near Washington, DC. There is now an attempt to repeat this project with higher resolution images but only with body parts, not corpses.
Video Visible Human Project
Data
The bodies of men are wrapped and frozen in a mixture of gelatin and water to stabilize the specimen to cut. The specimen is then "cut" in the axial plane at 1 millimeter interval. Each of the 1,871 "irises" generated photographed in analog and digital, yields 15 gigabytes of data. In 2000, the photographs were scanned back at a higher resolution, generating more than 65 gigabytes. The female body was cut into slices at an interval of 0.33 millimeters, yielding about 40 gigabytes of data.
The term "cut" is a bit of a misnomer, but is used to describe the process of rinsing the top surface of a specimen periodically. The term "slice," is also a misnomer, referring to the surface of the specimen revealed to be photographed; the surface grinding process remotely completely damages the specimen and leaves no "wedge" the remains of the corpse.
This data is complemented by axial parts of the entire body obtained by computed tomography, axial head and neck portions obtained by magnetic resonance imaging, and the rest of the coronal body is also obtained by magnetic resonance imaging.
Scanning, slicing and shooting took place at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where additional anatomical specimen cuts continued.
Maps Visible Human Project
Donor
The man's body was from Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 38-year-old Texas assassin who was executed with lethal injection on August 5, 1993. At the urging of a prison pastor he agreed to donate his body for scientific research or medical use, without knowing about the Visible Human Project. Some people have voiced ethical concerns over this. One of the most important statements comes from the University of Vienna demanding that the drawings be drawn with reference to the point that the medical profession should have no connection with the execution, and that donor informed consent can be investigated.
The 59-year-old female donor remains anonymous. In the press he is portrayed as a Maryland housewife who died of a heart attack and whose husband requested that he be part of the project.
Problems with data set
Freezing causes the male brain to become slightly swollen, and the middle ear ossicles are lost during the preparation of the incision. The nerves are hard to know because they have a color that is almost the same as the fat, but many are still identified. Small blood vessels collapse by clotting process. Tendons are difficult to cut neatly, and sometimes smeared across the cut surface.
Men have only one testicle, no appendix, and have tissue damage at the lethal injection site. Also seen is tissue damage on the dorsum of each forearm with formalin injection and damage to the right sartorius from the opening of the right femoral vein for drainage. The man is also not "cut" while in a standard anatomical position, so that the wound on his arm appears to be skewed. The woman lost 14 body parts that included nasal cartilage.
Female reproductive organs do not represent young women. The specimen contains several pathologies, including cardiovascular disease and diverticulitis.
Discovery
By studying the data set, researchers at Columbia University found several errors in anatomy textbooks, related to muscle shape in the pelvic area and the location of the bladder and prostate.
License
Data can be purchased with tapes or downloaded for free; one must specify the intended use and sign a license agreement allowing NLM to use and modify the resulting application. NLM may cancel the agreement at any time, at which point the user must delete the data file.
Applications using data
Projects to make raw data more useful for educational purposes are ongoing. It is necessary to construct a three dimensional virtual model of the body in which the organs are labeled, can be removed selectively and viewed from all sides, and ideally even animations. Two commercial software products completed most of these goals, VH Dissector from Touch of Life Technologies and "Voxel-Man 3D-Navigator" from the University of Hamburg NLM itself has started an open source project, Insight Toolkit, which aims to automatically deduct boundaries organs of data.
The data is used for Alexander Tsiaras book and CD-ROM "Body Voyage" featuring a three-dimensional tour through the body.
The "Virtual Radiography" application creates Digital Reconstruction Radiography and "virtual operations", in which a balloon endoscopic or angioplasty procedure is simulated: the surgeon can see the progress of the instrument on the screen and receive realistic tactile feedback according to the type of network the instrument will currently touch.
Some of the other educational applications used to form visible human projects include: multiple interactive computer anatomical software programs, multimodality image restoration for hospital patients, body system relationships, and volumetric data.
The data set of men is used in "Project 12:31", a series of photographic light paintings by Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott.
See also
- Indiana 3D
- Anatomography
- ImageVis3D
- Insight Segmentation and Registration Tool
- Primal Image
- Body Zigot
References
External links
- Project home page, including links to other projects that use data
- The Visible Man: Technical Report, Detailed history of the methods used to prepare male corpses and collect image data as published in a free article in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Medicine 1996
- Human Server Visible to EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique FÃÆ' © dÃÆ' Â © rale de Lausanne). Extensive Java applets to view, extract, and animate slices. Also applet for 3D feature extraction.
- Touch of Life Technology Commercial website generating Dissector VH, a virtual dissection program using the Human Visible dataset.
- The Visible Human Projects page of the University of Michigan
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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