Chinese Visible Human, 3D Reconstruction Of Organs Of Abdominal And Pelvic Cavity

PrefaceWhile in classical medicine, knowledge about the human body is represented in books and atlases, present - day computer science allows for new, more powerful and versatile computer - based representations of knowledge. Their most simple manifestations are multimedia CD - ROMs containing collections of classical pictures and text, which may be browsed arbitrarily or according to various criteria. Although computerized, such media still follow the old paradigm of text printed on pages accompanied by pictures. This genre includes impressive atlases of cross - sectional anatomy, notably from the photographic cross -sections of the Visible Human Project. In the past years, however, it has been shown that pictorial knowledge, especially about the structure of the human body, may be much more efficiently represented by computerized 3D models, which can be constructed from cross - sectional images generated by computer tomography (CT) , magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) , or histologic cryosec-tioning, as in the case of the Visible Human Project. Such models may be used interactively on a computer screen or even in " virtual reality" environments. If such models are connected to a data base of descriptive information, they can e-ven be interrogated or disassembled by addressing names of organs. They can thus be regarded as a " self — explaining body".Until now, the Visible Human Project has not reported 3D models that reflect the rich anatomical detail of the original cross - sectional images. This is due to the fact that, for the majority of anatomical objects contained in the data, the cross - sectional images could not be converted into a set of coherent realistic...