The Visible Human Project

The Visible Human Project is an outgrowth of the NLM's 1986 Long-Range Plan. It is creating a complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the male and female human body. The current phase of the project is collecting transverse CAT, MRI and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers at one 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.

Further Information:

• A description of the Visible Human data & how to obtain it.
• The Visible Human FactSheet.
• A sampler of images from the Project.

• Sun workstation users (SunOS/Solaris) can employ an exciting data browsing and retrieval tool, Visible Human Explorer, produced by a collaboration between NLM and the University of Maryland.
• Information provided by one of the Project collaborators, NCAR.
• Access to 3456 pre-computed reconstructions of the Visible Human male, offered as part of the Caltech Interactive Volume Browser. You can navigate between these images using a geographical metaphor.
• Marching Through the Visible Man, a paper written by Bill Lorensen of the GE Imaging & Visualization Laboratory, including images and animations.
• Smoky Hill High School Visible Human Digital Anatomy Project (note: won't work with all WWW clients).
• The University of Hamburg's Department of Computer Science in Medicine is exploring the creation of a VOXEL-MAN atlas using the Visible Human dataset.
• The University of Colorado Center for Human Simulation server.
• Information about one of the first available Visible Human CD-ROM compendia.