Show HN: The Open Anatomy Project
openanatomy.org
openanatomy.org
The Open Anatomy Project is an effort to develop community-authored, high-quality digital anatomy atlases that are free and open for any purpose.
We believe that anatomical information is so important for human health that it should be free and easily accessible. Our lab, the Surgical Planning Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has developed a variety of detailed data sets through grants funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH also sponsored development of 3D Slicer ( https://slicer.org ), our open-source cross-platform medical analysis and visualization platform.
Open Anatomy is a way for us to make that data useful for medical education and further scientific discovery. We are structuring the atlas data format to allow concepts from collaborative software development (such as diffing, forking, and pull requests) to be used as part of open data development. As a result, we believe we can build a community-based atlas portal based on the same principles as Wikipedia and GitHub. The atlases are modular, so pieces can be used for new applications such as 3D printing, VR simulators, or data mining.
At the same time, we're working with medical colleagues throughout the world to create new atlases and to use them where they are needed most. We have collaborators in the Canary Islands, Senegal, Mozambique, and Mauritania who are working with us to bring our atlases to their medical classrooms.
Our atlas viewer is very much a prototype and isn't mobile friendly yet, but it shows off the atlases. We also have a tool called TAViewer ( https://taviewer.openanatomy.org ) for browsing medical information from Wikipedia and Wikidata. We want to integrate it with the anatomy browser to allow atlases to be spatial indices for anatomical information.
We are looking for collaborators and sponsors of all types to make this dream of free and open anatomical information a reality.