The
Visible Human
is a large data set of digitized images of a male and female human body,
produced by the
U.S. National Library of Medicine
for use in education and research.
Anatomical images were produced by digitizing photographs of finely
sectioned human cadavers.
MRI and X-ray tomography images are also included in the data set.
This data set provides an interesting example of a large digital image library. The raw data set of axial (horizontal) slices is about 54 Gbytes uncompressed. Slices in the sagittal (side-on) and coronal (front-on) directions have been reconstructed from this data, which increases the size of the data set by a factor of 3.
To allow easy access to this large image data archive, we have made the images available online through a Web server, and implemented a user-friendly Java applet interface for viewing the images using a Web browser. We have also created a number of animations of the image slices.
This required careful cropping, resizing and and compressing of the images, and providing the user with the ability to crop out a smaller section of the image, in order to enable fast downloads of the images, even on low bandwidth Internet connections.
This work was done in collaboration with the
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center
(NPAC) at Syracuse University in the USA.
For more information, contact
Paul Coddington.