Visible Human Projects - a step towards the virtual patient: models and simulations

This paper reports on our experiences using datasets from the Visible Human Project in different biomedical applications. Introduced 1994 by the US National Library of Medicine the digitized multimodal anatomical datasets of the Visible Man have challenged the worldwide scientific community. A significant response to this challenge from several interdisciplinary research teams has emerged as a new area of research. This area requires close interaction and collaboration among anatomists, radiologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers and physicians. The digitized volumetric images of the human body have been applied not only for the computer-aided exploration of the human gross anatomy, but also as structural input for the therapy planning and simulation systems. The importance of such virtual patient model is becoming increasingly recognized in modern medicine. To effectively use these specific datasets a sophisticated framework consisting of image processing, computer graphics and mathematical modelling methods is required. In this work various aspects of the developed framework are presented and discussed. Some preliminary results of our biomedical simulations are presented.