Welcome to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Visible Human Site
Providing Novel Views of Visible Human Data for Anatomy Training
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is collaborating with Dr. Brian Athey and his team at the University of Michigan to provide high-speed NGI access to the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human data for use in anatomy classrooms. In this setting, groups of anatomy students will simultaneously refer to different parts of the Visible Human data to help with their studies of actual cadaver anatomy. The actual Visible Human data capture was done by Vic Spitzer and his team at the University of Colorado's Center for Human Simulation.
The Pittsburgh portion of the project provides expertise and assistance in deploying technologies such as networking, data structures, visualization, and high performance computing. The Pittsburgh team works closely with anatomists, user interface developers, and evaluation teams at the University of Michigan to provide the tools which best fit user needs. The project will provide labeled views of the Visible Human data that has previously been difficult to access. High-performance computing permits real-time navigation through the dataset. The project also benefits from other networking projects at PSC, including the Web100 research.
The image library shows some of the novel viewing capabilities provided by the project. Along with web-based retrieval of Visible Human slice data in original and orthogonal planar formats, the project's PSC Volume Browser implementation allows arbitrary views to be constructed directly from the datasets in real time to best illustrate anatomical features. The University of Michigan's Edgewarp program for morphometric analysis, developed by Drs Fred Bookstein and William Green, has also been enhanced to work with the PSV Volume Server.
Collaborating Teams
PSC: Arthur W. Wetzel, Stuart Pomerantz, Anjana Kar, Jason Sommerfield, Matt Mathis, Nathan Stone and David Deerfield
University of Michigan: Brian Athey, Victor Wong, Carl Berger, Fred Bookstein, Alex Ade, Walter Meixner, Tom Gest, Deborah Walker, Neil Skov, Bill Green, Terry Weymouth
