| Supplied Information: |
This CD-ROM for Macintosh and PC users includes all of the identical images appearing on the videodisc plus a graphical user Navigator allowing fast and convenient database manipulation.
New Insights-Profound Understanding
Investigate and display the Visible Human Male from head-to toe using the Visible Human Male CD-ROM. More than 10,000 images (14 Gigabytes!) - in axial, coronal, and sagittal orientations - give you a simple, yet powerful tool for education and exploration. It is the
most complete, convenient anatomical reference available. For efficient storage and retrieval, the Visible Human data are compressed onto a single CD using JPEG, the industry standard compression format.
The Visible Human Data and More
Working in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine, our team acquired 1,878 axial photos and computed the sagittal and coronal cross-sections, allowing you to view the Visible Human from any of three orientations.
Display the Visible Human in Common Modalities
Vivid digital colour photos, along with magnetic resonance (MR) and registered computed tomography (CT) images, give you new perspectives into the structure and function of the body. Scaling and translation of the CT data were performed to align the anatomy with the digital photos obtained from the National Library of Medicine.
Imagine Exploring an Entire Human Body with the Click of a Mouse!
Voyage through the body guided by the graphical Navigator. Quickly reference images using bookmarks. Animate a series of images to gain insight into anatomical relationships and structure. Annotate and highlight areas of interest with text, colour, and markers. Adjust brightness and gamma corrections of MR and CT images for interactive analysis.
Export Images to Popular Formats
Easily export a single image, or sets of images, for processing or output to standard graphics formats such as TIFF, PICT, GIF, PostScript, EPS, JPEG, and BMP.
A Powerful Reference for Education and Research on Your Desktop
The Visible Human Male CD-ROM is available for Windows, Windows NT, Macintosh, Power Macintosh, and Unix workstations from Sun, Hewlett Packard, and Silicon Graphics. You can even view the Visible Human from any node in your network with access to a CD-ROM drive.
The New Standard for Education & Research
Annotation
Overlay text, lines, polygons, rectangles, and ellipses using the intuitive annotation toolbox. For publication-quality output, quickly select fonts, colours and other attributes for labels and geometric shapes. Interactive positioning and duplication is easily performed simply by moving the mouse. Annotated images can be saved to a file and later opened for manipulation and processing in popular desktop publishing programs.
Animation
In contrast to single, static images, animations give you insights into the three-dimensional relationships among anatomical elements. Travel through a series of images, via movie-loops, by selecting a range of images to be animated. You control the speed and direction of playbacks.
Photos, CT & MR
See individual images in any common modality. Research Systems' Visible Human CD includes coronal and sagittal cross-sections for digital photos and registered CT images (windowed for bone and soft tissue). MR data are available in T1, T2, and proton density forms. |
| Review: |
This CD is an image bank of colour photographs of 1 mm head-to-toe sections through a human male that can be viewed in axial, coronal or sagittal orientations and are supplemented by computerised tomography and MR images. This provides an amazing database of images of the anatomy. Not only can each of the images be displayed in increasing magnification but an animation facility allows the user to compile a 3-D movie of selected regions. The photographic images themselves are quite good particularly at the lower magnifications, however as the user ëzooms-iní the resolution quality decreases limiting the usefulness of the zoom-in and zoom-out facilities. The quality of the computerised tomography and MR images are, in general better than those of the photographs. The grey scale in these images can also be altered by the user which is an advantage. Other facilities within the database allow the user to bookmark sections, annotate the images by adding labels, and export images.
While the overall CD is a wonderful collection of images the use of the program is not easy to master. Even with the use of the instruction manual it would take several hours of fiddling to learn to use the program with any great efficiency, navigation within the program is poorly explained and the instruction manual is not as clear as it could be. For example annotation of images is quite easy once you get the hang of it, but this took quite a while to learn, and this was while following the manual step-by-step. I would hesitate to recommend this use of this as a stand alone teaching tool for student use or for dipping into for a quick look at human anatomy - a considerable amount of time would be required to familiarise a student user with navigation. However I can see this being a valuable tool of staff, particularly for preparing short animations or slides for lectures. The annotation facility would be ideal in this situation where a lecturer could select and annotate (label, circle, shade, etc) particular structures that could then be shown to students. In this context the CD could be a very flexible teaching tool. |
