The visible human project(®): From body to bits.

In the middle 1990's the U.S. National Library sponsored the acquisition and development of the Visible Human Project(®) data base. This image database contains anatomical cross-sectional images which allow the reconstruction of three dimensional male and female anatomy to an accuracy of less than 1.0 mm. The male anatomy is contained in a 15 gigabyte database, the female in a 39 gigabyte database. This talk will describe why and how this project was accomplished and demonstrate some of the products which the Visible Human dataset has made possible. I will conclude by describing how the Visible Human Project, completed over 20 years ago, has led the National Library of Medicine to a series of image research projects including an open source image processing toolkit which is included in several commercial products.