The Visible Human Project (VHP), anatomical modeling and related
endeavors:
The Visible
Human ProjectNational
Library of Medicine
“The
Visible Human Project® is an outgrowth of the NLM's 1986 Long-Range
Plan. It is the creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional
representations of the normal male and female human bodies. Acquisition of
transverse CT, MR and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers
has been completed. The male was sectioned at one millimeter intervals, the
female at one-third of a millimeter intervals. The long-term goal of the
Visible Human Project® is to produce a system of knowledge
structures that will transparently link visual knowledge forms to symbolic
knowledge formats such as the names of body parts.”
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
“The Center for Human Simulation
(CHS) is a synthesis of human anatomy and computed three-dimensional imaging.
This synthesis resulted in a three-dimensional, high resolution database of
human male and female anatomy (the Visible Human) as derived from direct
analysis of anatomical specimens and radiological imaging. The general
purpose of this Center is to facilitate the collaboration of anatomists,
radiologists, computer scientists, engineers, physicians and educators to
promote the application of this and other anatomical data to basic and clinical
research, clinical practice and teaching.”
SUMMIT (Stanford
University Medical Media and Information Technologies) Program
Stanford
University
“The Stanford Visible Female dataset, restricted to the
female pelvis, is similar to the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project. Both datasets are a series of
digitized color photographs of human cryosections. They are being utilized in
multiple ways, including in teaching human anatomy, basic research, and for
developing 3D models of human anatomy.”
The University of
Michigan Visible Human Project
“The NLM
sponsored University of Michigan Visible Human
Project in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will implement the Next
Generation Internet (NGI) to serve the Visible Human data to a wide range
of users. This information will be accessed using standard 2D browsers as well
as a 3D "Edgewarp"
browser. Linked to the 3D representations will be video, audio, text, and
graphics to explain and expand upon the images. The UM team will develop and
evaluate these new virtual tools with input from users in various testbed
groups (e.g., anatomy, nursing, surgical, and dental). Physicians, medical
personnel, researchers, engineers, and students; using high speed Internet
access; will be able to view and interact with the human body online as never
before. The development of a new and detailed anatomic database holds the
potential of transforming research, medical education, training, diagnosis, and
treatment.”
The Visible
Human Project Insight Software Toolkit
“Insight is a project to develop an
application programmer interface (API) and first implementation of a
segmentation and registration toolkit. The goal of this initiative is to create
a self-sustaining code development effort to support image analysis research in
segmentation, classification, and deformableregistration of medical images.
Ultimately, we hope that this will be a public software resource that will
serve as a foundation for future medical image understanding research. The
intent is to amplify the investment being made through the Visible Human
Project and future programs for medical image analysis by reducing the
reinvention of basic algorithms. We are also hoping to empower young
researchers and small research laboratories with the kernel of an image
analysis system in the public domain. An objective of NLM and partner
Institutes is to support development that will form prototypes for advanced
applications based on the VHP data sets.”
Anatomy
Markup Language (AnatML)
“As our research group accumulated data during the
digitisation of a skeleton, it became apparent that some kind of system was
needed to keep track of this information. As we are also working on FieldML, an
XML-based markup language for describing spatially varying fields, it seemed
appropriate to have another XML-based language that included FieldML as a
subset, as well as storing any additional information that we needed. The
result is AnatML, a
language for storing geometric information and documentation obtained as part
of the musculoskeletal modelling project… The Musculoskeletal Modelling Project
is a part of the Physiome Project which seeks to apply mathematical
modelling to physiology in order to assist in integrating whole organ function
to its underlying biophysically detailed mechanisms. The scope of this project
requires international and interdisciplinary cooperation. To assist this the
Bio-engineering Group is developing a number of XML-based languages to enable
easy dissemination and circulation of data amongst contributing scientists.
This website contains the specfication for AnatML - Anatomical Markup Language”.
Gold Standard
Multimedia, Inc. (COMMERCIAL SITE)
The Virtual Human Gallery
The Virtual Human Gallery will be re-released in Spring 2001
as one of the world's premier collections of scientifically accurate 3D
anatomical imagery, animations, and multimedia. Our medical illustration and
programming teams are rapidly building the new site, which will offer you the
opportunity to browse and link to (for free) or download (for a fee) a
comprehensive collection of content for your education, teaching, presentation,
and project needs. Until then, we invite you to share your suggestions with us via email.
Vision,
Analysis, and Simulation Technologies (VAST) Laboratory
University of Pennsylvania
“Research in the VAST lab lies in the area of physics-based
modeling of deformable and articulated objects. The major focus has been the
development of a mathematically rigorous and computationally efficient
framework that has addressed important problems in computer vision, computer
graphics and medical image analysis in a unified way. Most of these problems
could not be addressed successfully with traditional, non physics-based
methods…In the span of roughly three decades, vision and graphics (including
modeling techniques for medical imaging), have matured into major fields of
computer science. Surprisingly, however, their evolution has been largely
independent, despite the fact that, traditionally, graphics deal with the forward
problem of synthesizing images from object models, while vision deals with
the inverse problem of analyzing images to infer object models.
Therefore, the modeling of object shape and motion is fundamentally important
to these fields. Based on research conducted in the last 10 years,
physics-based modeling techniques have demonstrated that they offer the power
and generality needed to bridge the gap that separates vision and graphics
research and can successfully address and solve difficult problems in computer
vision, computer graphics and medical imaging in a unified way.”
Laboratory of
Neuro Imaging (LONI)
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
“The
Laboratory of Neuro Imaging was originally established to study cerebral
metabolism with the goal of understanding the relationship between brain
structure and function using image data. Work progressed into three-dimensional
reconstruction and visualization. This enabled the study of functional anatomy
in the same geometric configuration as that found in the living animal. As
these reconstructions became more sophisticated, their application to
computational atlases became possible…Human brain structure and function are so
complex that powerful computational tools are required to analyze brain data.
Given the fact that there is neither a single representative brain nor a simple
method to construct an 'average' anatomy or represent the complex variations
around it, the construction of brain atlases became the focus of intense
research. Brain atlases are based on detailed representations of anatomy in a
standardized 3D coordinate system. The Laboratory addressed the problem of
comparing data across individuals as well as across modalities and increased
work in humans began. Work focused on statistical manipulation of the geometry
that made up the anatomic and functional data sets as well as sophisticated
visualizations permitting the communication of the results.”
Medical Image
Display and Analysis Group (MIDAG)
University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“While the work of MIDAG has
covered a very wide range of medical images and numerous areas of image
processing and display, structure based image analysis has become a major area
of focus in the last decade. Our recent areas of research focus, with its
leaders, have been from a clinical point of view (in order of the number of
members involved) the following: computer-aided 3D radiation treatment planning
and delivery (Chaney, Rosenman), evaluation of digital mammography and its
contrast enhancement (Pisano), correlation of brain structure shape and volume
with various diseases and conditions of the brain (Lieberman, Krishnan, Gerig),
neurosurgery guided by visualization of vessels and tumors (Bullitt), surgery
of the spine (Bullitt), guiding biopsy and laparoscopy via augmented reality
(Pisano, Meyer, Fuchs), liver shunt delivery (Weeks, Aylward), measuring
tortuosity of infant retinal vessels (Aylward); and from a scientific point of
view: geometric model based image analysis (Gerig, Pizer, Fritsch ), extraction
and visualization of trees of tubes (Aylward, Bullitt), augmented reality
(Fuchs), contrast enhancement (Pizer, Hemminger, Aylward), shape-based
multi-intensity tumor extraction (Gerig, Pizer).”
Scripps Research Institute
“This laboratory is interested in
developing novel techniques for the computation, analysis, and modeling of the
interaction of protein-ligand, protein-protein and other biomolecular systems”.