Virtual human built from more than 5000 slices of a real woman

They were 1/2" slices, actually. That was the 1/2" Man and Woman Body Slices exhibit. They'd been there since the 1940s I think, but they moved them out a few years ago when the BodyWorlds exhibit was put in. I don't know if they ever came back.

The man was sliced horizontally and the woman was sliced vertically.

It was pretty close to the exhibit of 9 months of miscarried human embryos and fetuses in jars if I remember correctly.

I used to try to avoid that stairwell!

Sadly, this is one of the reasons I refuse to see any such exhibits.

> They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.

I wouldn't mind ending up like this. While my body may not go on to help someone cure cancer, it's definitely educational for children to peer inside the body, for a short a time as you could spend on a stairwell.

Besides - my kids would (hopefully) hear of me travelling around the world, or perhaps stuck in the back of a dusty vault of some museum. Better that than being stuck in a hole in the ground.

Thanks for sharing! It's... strangely horrifying to mess around with. At one point, it suddenly hit me that the same biological structures were thinking the thoughts I was having and operating my smartphone.

That really is quite remarkable!

My reaction when he pulled the stent out was that went wrong then he said that is of course the stent.

When he flew the tour of the arteries was an actual verbal holy shit moment, I have an oesphagal problem and this kind of imaging would be frankly incredible.

I'd love to see what he could with a modern slide set from a high resolution state of the art MRI.

Wow Watching that video caused me to finally grok how revolutionary VR will be in applications beyond mere entertainment. The ability to immerse someone in that kind of dynamic visualization of data and allow them to interact with it presents new vistas for everything from brain surgery to stock trading.

Any idea if I can run any comparable anatomical software on a smartphone for my Homido VR setup?

We are all just bags of meat.

That bothered me too. You're not alone.

Frozen so they wouldn't move around, and a very sharp saw.

No, a band-saw has a kerf, an amount of material that it destroys in the process of cutting. You don't want that.

What you want is more of a slicing action, like a knife.

I would imagine that it was done with a very big, very precise guillotine style cutting implement.

You ask a good question. It's a shame you got downvoted.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/horizon/jan99/...

> When the NLM advertised for bidders willing to cut a human body into thin slices and photograph each slice, there was far more interest than anyone anticipated. About 100 of the approximately 120 American medical schools, collaborating in various combinations, formed six consortia to apply for the contract.

> The field was narrowed to three. Each consortium was asked to submit pictures of slices, taken 1 millimeter apart, from the abdomen of an animal or human body. One millimeter is about the thickness of a dime. A committee of anatomists and radiologists then chose the best. The winning bidder was a consortium of institutions in Colorado, Texas and Maryland.

> The actual work on the cadavers – first a male, then a female – occurred at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Under the direction of two scientists, Victor Spitzer and David Whitlock, the bodies first underwent head-to-toe CAT and MRI scans before being frozen solid.

> To make them easier to handle, the bodies then were cut into four pieces with a special saw. Each of the three cuts – separating the body into sections containing head, neck and thorax, abdomen and pelvis, thighs and knees, and legs, ankles and feet – lost only 1.5 mm of tissue, represented by black space in the stacked final images.

> It is more accurate to say that the cadavers were milled rather than sliced. The bodies were packed in dry ice and surrounded by a slurry of frozen alcohol at temperatures between minus 90 and minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

> Starting from one end of a body section, a rotary rasp ground down the tissue to a specified depth. In the male, this depth was 1 mm. In the anatomically more complicated female, it was .33 mm, providing three times as much detail.

> Each round of milling exposed a smooth, rock-hard surface in which the anatomical features were visible like the grain in a log. The surface then was photographed using both digital and conventional film cameras before removal of the next "cryosection."

> Each cycle required from three to 15 minutes to complete, and the Colorado team could do about 50 each day. The work was meticulous because, once the rasp started, there was no second chance. The tissue came off in a frozen powder, which was collected, stored and ultimately "cremated in a respectful manner," according to an NLM official.