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The visible human project marries some macabre “surgery” with powerful workstations and supercomputers to create a database of the human anatomy. Marrying this to growth, response and knowledge databases could, somewhere in the future, create a virtual, fully digital human
How would it be if there were a complete digital representation of the human body? You would be able to understand diseases or practice complex surgeries before doing them live. You could simulate the reactions of the human body to external stimuli like a vehicle crash. The amount of detail you would need of the human body for doing all this is enormous. The visible human project marries some macabre “surgery” with powerful workstations and supercomputers to deliver this.
In fact, there are four visible humans. A male and a female in the US, and a male each in South Korea and China. The US projects came first and are the most documented. The Korean project came next and finally came the visible Chinese.
The first visible human was created by the US National Library of Medicine, or rather the first visible human database was created there, with work starting in 1986. The exact process of creating the database provides for unsavory reading (see box Slicing them up).
The images thus created represent a huge database, which is not of much use as is. It is here that powerful workstations, visualizing software and supercomputers step in. Many offshoots of this project have successfully created animations, walkthroughs and simulations of the human body (see examples on this month’s CD).
A fully-functional, virtual human being could well be just one big step away.
Krishna Kumar
Slicing them up
The
weak at heart may want to skip this box.
The visible human database is created in a rather macabre fashion.
The first male was a 39-year old American, executed by lethal
injection in Texas. The female was a 59-year old woman who died of a
heart attack. Both bodies were donated to medical research, by the
man before he died and by the woman’s husband.
The dead bodies (cadavers) were thoroughly CT and MRI scanned and
also X-Rayed. They were then encased in blue Gelatin, and frozen.
They were then physically sliced. The male cadaver was sliced into
one millimeter thick slices while the female was sliced into slices
a third of a millimeter thick. Each slice was photographed.
The Visible Korea Human is also done at 1 mm thickness, while the
visible Chinese male is done at 0.1 mm thickness.