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The Visible Human Project of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health is a project building a
digital image library of volumetric data representing a complete, normal adult male and female.
The Visible Human Male
data set consists of MRI, CT and anatomical images. Axial MRI images of the head and neck and longitudinal sections of the
rest of the body were obtained at 4mm intervals. The CT data consists of axial CT scans of the entire body taken at 1mm intervals.
The axial anatomical images are 2048 pixels by 1216 pixels where each pixel is defined by 24 bits of color, about 7.5 megabytes.
The anatomical cross-sections are also at 1mm intervals and coincide with the CT axial images. There are 1871 cross-sections
for each mode, CT and anatomy. The complete male data set is 15 gigabytes in size. The Visible Human Female data set has the
same characteristics as the male cadaver with one exception. The axial anatomical images were obtained at 0.33mm intervals
instead of 1.0mm intervals. This resulted in over 5,000 anatomical images. The data set is about 40 gigabytes.
Basic
research is needed in the description and representation of image based structures, and to connect image-based structural-anatomical
data to text-based functional-physiological data. The long-term goal of the Visible Human Project is to transparently link
the print library of functional-physiological knowledge with the image library of structural-anatomical knowledge into one
unified resource of health information.
Click here for link to Visible Human Project.
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