
Virtual human built from more than 5000 slices of a real woman - ClintEhrlich
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730404-000-virtual-human-built-from-more-than-5000-slices-of-a-real-woman/#bx304040B1
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ourmandave
I remember as a kid going through a museum in Chicago and they had a display
of 1/4" thick sliced bodies set in door sized glass plates. They were mounted
so you could swing them like shopping for a poster at Target.

The part that struck me was that they were displayed on a large wall along a
stair landing between floors. It was just so out of context and kind of sad.
They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.

~~~
nsxwolf
They were 1/2" slices, actually. That was the 1/2" Man and Woman Body Slices
exhibit. They'd been there since the 1940s I think, but they moved them out a
few years ago when the BodyWorlds exhibit was put in. I don't know if they
ever came back.

The man was sliced horizontally and the woman was sliced vertically.

It was pretty close to the exhibit of 9 months of miscarried human embryos and
fetuses in jars if I remember correctly.

I used to try to avoid that stairwell!

~~~
ZeWaren
We have the same things here in France. A couple times every year, you are
allowed to visit them at 2am, in the dark with only a flashlight.

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mikepalmer
Visualization of this data from almost 20 years ago - I used it as example
data for my PhD thesis:

[http://mepalmer.net/ibb/](http://mepalmer.net/ibb/)

The views are all pre-rendered. Sorry for the old school site, circa 1996!

~~~
ClintEhrlich
Thanks for sharing! It's... strangely horrifying to mess around with. At one
point, it suddenly hit me that the same biological structures were thinking
the thoughts I was having and operating my smartphone.

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rawnlq
Should also check out what's possible with VR tech for visualizations nowadays
[http://youtu.be/MWGBRsV9omw](http://youtu.be/MWGBRsV9omw)

~~~
noir_lord
My reaction when he pulled the stent out was that went wrong then he said that
is of course the stent.

When he flew the tour of the arteries was an actual verbal holy shit moment, I
have an oesphagal problem and this kind of imaging would be frankly
incredible.

I'd love to see what he could with a modern slide set from a high resolution
state of the art MRI.

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gaborodriguez
For my bachelor thesis I did a Volume Rendering visualization of this dataset.
You can have a look at it here:
[https://vimeo.com/12199932](https://vimeo.com/12199932). Caching 16GB of data
in the GPU.

~~~
TranquilMarmot
We are all just bags of meat.

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Someone
See also:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project)
(general info),
[http://visiblehuman.epfl.ch/index.php](http://visiblehuman.epfl.ch/index.php)
('virtual an atomic construction kit'),
[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/getting_data.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/getting_data.html)
(source data, with sample pictures)

If you sign the necessary license, you can download the data for free.

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cryptophreak
Has nobody noticed that the URL awkwardly skips to a footnote (/#bx304040B1)?

~~~
scott_karana
That bothered me too. You're not alone.

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visarga
No access, no fun.

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swampthinker
Did it included some fava beans and a nice chianti?

On a more serious note, I wonder how they actually cut these bodies? A band
saw maybe?

~~~
DanBC
You ask a good question. It's a shame you got downvoted.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/horizon/jan99/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/horizon/jan99/body.htm)

> When the NLM advertised for bidders willing to cut a human body into thin
> slices and photograph each slice, there was far more interest than anyone
> anticipated. About 100 of the approximately 120 American medical schools,
> collaborating in various combinations, formed six consortia to apply for the
> contract.

> The field was narrowed to three. Each consortium was asked to submit
> pictures of slices, taken 1 millimeter apart, from the abdomen of an animal
> or human body. One millimeter is about the thickness of a dime. A committee
> of anatomists and radiologists then chose the best. The winning bidder was a
> consortium of institutions in Colorado, Texas and Maryland.

> The actual work on the cadavers – first a male, then a female – occurred at
> the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Under the
> direction of two scientists, Victor Spitzer and David Whitlock, the bodies
> first underwent head-to-toe CAT and MRI scans before being frozen solid.

> To make them easier to handle, the bodies then were cut into four pieces
> with a special saw. Each of the three cuts – separating the body into
> sections containing head, neck and thorax, abdomen and pelvis, thighs and
> knees, and legs, ankles and feet – lost only 1.5 mm of tissue, represented
> by black space in the stacked final images.

> It is more accurate to say that the cadavers were milled rather than sliced.
> The bodies were packed in dry ice and surrounded by a slurry of frozen
> alcohol at temperatures between minus 90 and minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

> Starting from one end of a body section, a rotary rasp ground down the
> tissue to a specified depth. In the male, this depth was 1 mm. In the
> anatomically more complicated female, it was .33 mm, providing three times
> as much detail.

> Each round of milling exposed a smooth, rock-hard surface in which the
> anatomical features were visible like the grain in a log. The surface then
> was photographed using both digital and conventional film cameras before
> removal of the next "cryosection."

> Each cycle required from three to 15 minutes to complete, and the Colorado
> team could do about 50 each day. The work was meticulous because, once the
> rasp started, there was no second chance. The tissue came off in a frozen
> powder, which was collected, stored and ultimately "cremated in a respectful
> manner," according to an NLM official.

~~~
swampthinker
> Starting from one end of a body section, a rotary rasp ground down the
> tissue to a specified depth

Interesting. So they did not preserve the slices, but rather ground off
shavings little-by-little. I had envisioned the process similar to slicing
meat at the deli.

Looking at the pictures in the article again, you can actually see that the
cadaver was frozen in a liquid.

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lordleft
Just saying that this is the creepiest goddamned title for an article I've
ever read.

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madstanners
This totally ruined my coffee break.

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pc86
So it's Docker For People

