Sister post to the Visible Human project post by Rajini Rao

Sister post to the Visible Human project post by Rajini Rao

http://goo.gl/oxSiY

I’m focusing on the software that it has spawned.

What you see below is a screenshot from Zygote Body browser, formerly Google Body Browser. http://goo.gl/7DJlZ (Interactive, try it!)

Wiki (http://goo.gl/soFZz) has cow Google April fools joke.

The name visible human project is interesting because they started out with a visible technique, i.e, photographing “slices” of a frozen male cadaver. The technique was improved for the female cadaver the next year. They added CT and MRI data later. For my field, two programming languages or platforms came out of the NIH sponsored project ITK and VTK. Almost all modern segmentation and 3D visualization software owes something to ITK (http://goo.gl/qZhFR) and/or VTK (http://goo.gl/nocQ3).

Cool examples here:

http://www.vtk.org/VTK/project/casestudies.html

You can get a feel for how the visualization goes for the female data here:

http://goo.gl/Xye5

Atlas

In the medical imaging community we often talk about atlases. An atlas in this context is a “generic” organ or in some cases whole organism that you use to guide you anatomically, eh, like an atlas for a traveler. For example, one might have a brain atlas that shows the generic human brain. You would take the atlas, where you know the anatomy and use it to either segment a brain that has a defect or guide you on a functional image like positron emission tomography (PET) which used fluorodeoxyglucose labeled with F-18 to show metabolism. If you’ve seen my other ScienceSunday posts you’ll already know I talk a lot about functional vs. anatomical images. The example shown below is from the Harvard MRI/PET atlas (interactive Javascript) demonstrating how in the MRI the fornix is easy to find but not in the PET image. When the atlas is used in a fused image, the fornix is easier to find in the PET image.

Harvard MRI atlas in action. (Interactive, try it!)

http://goo.gl/6NNI0

Suffice it to say, I ♥ this stuff

The Visible Human project Wiki (http://goo.gl/Lc8bG) and NLM (http://goo.gl/DrsLo).

#sciencesunday

9 thoughts on “Sister post to the Visible Human project post by Rajini Rao”

  1. Perfect complement to the Visible Human post, thank you Chad Haney ! Could you direct people here from my post in a comment with a link? Or should I add to main post..the other commentators will not be notified then.

  2. Rajini Rao, I’m guessing Allison Sekuler and Robby Bowles are busy. Maybe they could link our posts if they decide to add them to ScienceSunday.

Leave a Reply