Virtual human – a living cadaver – pushes boundaries of anatomical science(2018)

news.cuanschutz.edu

31 points·the_red_mist··12 comments

Wikipedia has more details about the project and the donors, and high quality photos (warning, human cadaver cryosections): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project

What the OP article notes, that Wikipedia doesn't, is that Susan Potter was imaged in layers just 63 microns thick, vs 300 for the earlier female donor, and 1000 microns for the male.

For those interested the data is publicly available here:

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/getting_data.html

Thank you for this! Too bad there isn't an already prepared virtual project where you can view this in 3D. Might be a fun coding project to load the slices into a UI for easier viewing.

People are working on Virtual Twin[0] mumbo jumbo along these lines. Why bother with microscopic effects of ion channels and cell proliferation when you can simulate tissue dynamics with continuous gradients?

(Because the trees are often more informative than the forest itself...)

0: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin

This feels like a nothingburger. There isn't even a hint of how the virtual human works or a demo or anything. Just lots of back patting about the clever name.

You may want to check out the Wikipedia article. Seems like a fascinating and valuable project.

> This feels like a nothingburger. There isn't even a hint of [...] a demo or anything.

The visible human project has been around for quite some time and has, in fact, accomplished their initial project goals. And they do have a demo application, complete with a "guided tour", interview snippets and everything, all on a single CD-ROM! I remember playing around with it at the local library in December 2003.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com