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Open source 3D atlas of human anatomy (blender.org)
323 points by davikr 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments



Hey, I'm Lluis Vinent, co-founder of the Z-Anatomy association and creator of the Z-Anatomy app. Indeed, the page is down due to the dissolution of the association, but the project is not abandoned, just inactive. If someone wants to collaborate on its development, there is the GitHub repository where anyone can collaborate. https://github.com/LluisV/Z-Anatomy

I'm currently working on a VR version of Z-Anatomy. Maybe in the future I'll open a new website. This project deserves visibility.


Incredible work, thanks for your contributions.

To garner more interest for anyone coming in cold to the Github repo, linking to or embedding the original post might be worthwhile as it does a great job of talking through the project's value.

This project could be profoundly relevant to all of humankind, be it learning anatomy, or liaising with healthcare workers to talk through issues visually or in the commercial sector (e.g. producing photorealistic animated films/virtual try-on).

Edit: remove repetitive use of project


Hi, Lluis!. Would it be easy to contribute a translation? We are interested in adding Catalan.


Hi! Yes, it would be a great contribution! The translations are defined in an Excel file, accessible through Google Drive. It consists of 7300 elements. For more information please contact me through email lluisvinentdev@gmail.com


Is there data on how the parts move and deform due to human actions such as walking?


Hi Lluis! I was wondering if the Discord is still up because I like to see the other projects people make with it.


I'd also be interested in potentially collaborating with people this Summer on further, similar projects. I'd love to have access to a collaborative space to find folks interested in it, however, I'm a little reluctant to discuss as I've yet to secure permissions explicitly.


No, but since there are several people willing to collaborate, I'll surely open a new server soon. I'll send you the link right here!


Video is over a year old.

Their website is offline https://www.z-anatomy.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230601122004/https://www.z-ana... is the newest crawl of it but it doesn't have the zip file

That's here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18M7IuH2ai2fl21Ud0YH1... found via https://github.com/LluisV/Z-Anatomy

I messaged the company's linked in page to let them know https://www.linkedin.com/company/z-anatomy/

And messaged their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/GauthierKERYN/


And the source repo for the (Unity) viewer app: https://github.com/LluisV/Z-Anatomy


It's great to see that there are good open source 3d anatomical models. As an avid dancer and calisthenics enthusiast I found such models very useful for learning anatomy and range of motion of a human body in general both for myself and for explaining/discussing to/with others. So far my go-to app was https://www.zygotebody.com/ but you never know when Alphabet will bury it.

edit: typo


I think the true future of anatomy atlases is to address the kinds of applications you're describing. Open source anatomy atlases can become toolboxes of visual anatomical knowledge. Subsets of atlases can be used for patient education, with structures labeled and styled to meet the needs of the audience. Atlases can also be used as visual indexes into collections of medical data.

Finally, we need atlases that represent the breadth of humanity. It's far too easy to view the "typical anatomy" represented in a major atlas as "normal anatomy" with any variations being abnormal, rather than just less common. Open source atlases can fix all of those problems, ultimately providing a comprehensive and collaborative view of what human anatomy really is.


I can see bodybuilders and strength coaches getting a lot of value out of these as well.


The title is not correct, it should be:

The first open source 3D atlas of human anatomy in Blender.

There have been a variety of open source human anatomy atlases, though few of the entire human body. Not to take away from the great work that has gone into Z-Anatomy or the underlying data from the BodyParts3D project in Japan. The BodyParts3D data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1.

Disclaimer: I am the PI for the Open Anatomy project (https://openanatomy.org), which is working to build open source anatomy atlases for worldwide use. We also have an anatomy term viewer https://ta2viewer.openanatomy.org that uses the same nomenclature that Z-Anatomy uses, and which is linked from many Wikipedia anatomy articles.

[Edited to add the bp3d license.]


The "Blender" part is important though.

I have just downloaded the Z-Anatomy atlas in Blender format and I have opened it in Blender, on a Linux system.

It appears to work fine and it is usable even without the viewing application that is provided only for Android and Windows.

In the past I have used directly BodyParts3D, which is a great collection of 3D models and which remains very useful, as the models of various organs are easy to import in any 3D application.

This complete Blender model should be more convenient for exploring the whole body or for retargetting some captured motion on it to create an animated sequence where the internal movements of various organs are displayed, e.g. of muscles and bones.

Edit:

When I have looked for the first time at openanatomy.org, I have browsed too quickly and my initial impression was that the atlases can be viewed only online, in which case they would have been useless for me.

Looking a second time more carefully, I have seen that the atlases can also be downloaded and viewed with the free program 3D Slicer.

To test how it works, I have downloaded and installed 3D Slicer on a Linux system and I have also downloaded from Github one of the atlases of openanatomy.org, the brain atlas.

The atlas can be viewed without problems with 3D Slicer.

For some purposes the atlases from openanatomy.org may be more detailed, but the Z-Anatomy atlas offers complementary benefits as a whole body atlas that should be also easy to animate.


Ok, we've put it in Blender above. Thanks!

Edit: actually, I think it's better to take out "The First" instead. The Blender part is in the domain name.


https://openanatomy.org is also an opensource anatomy browser but fully online


I’m confused. Initial browsing suggests this is associated with the Blender foundation but it’s made in Unity?

Also: Does it have the fascial layers?


Blender is used for creating the model and Unity to build the app to explore the model


Z-Anatomy consists of a 3D modeling project (the anatomical models themselves) made in Blender, and a multi-platform application made in Unity. Yes, it contains the muscular fasciae.


AR is the obvious application for this, will be fun tearing into a human model and seeing/weighing all the guts!


Impressive and important work. I was wondering if there ever was a web version of this. Archived site mentions something, but I'm not sure if it was ever done. Using standalone application always feels like unnecessary friction to me. I'm out of my depth here, but since models are available, is it possible to just render them in WebGL or something like that. Would that be technically difficult ?


Actually yes. The PC app can be 'easily' exported to WebGL, as shown here: https://z-anatomy.netlify.app/ This version has the UI bugged, I share it only to show that it is possible, and in fact, it should not take much work.

This was in process just when the association dissolved, which is why it was left half done, but it is something I have pending, along with implementing all the improvements to the code that I am programming in the VR version.


Such a wonderful and awe-inspiring project! I was thinking to myself, someday a humanoid robotics company might use this, and then I look up the presenter’s LinkedIn, and turns out they are working at Clone Robotics! Kind of curious what’s happening there now.


Blender foundation is an absolute marvel.


Sniper Elite 6 is going to be wild.


sure, and why not...

Operation 2048: Total Surgery. New instruments: colonoscope, ventilator, laser scalpel and nanobots, and Machine-that-goes-ping! (tm) v2.0. With 20 new types of tumour to battle. Organ transplant add-on pack, plus cyber-implant mod. Play online with surgical team.


Maybe for the machine-that-goes-ping but otherwise I'm glad I read this in a sitting position.




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