The Visible Body – A Health 2.0 Tool for Visualizing Human Anatomy

Andrew Soucy, from The Visible Body (note: incorrect URL fixed, 3/17/08), contacted me after the Health 2.0 Conference and asked if I wouldn’t mind looking at this anatomic visualization application. He said

stumbled across your blog this morning, and wanted to see if this might interest you, esp. given your coverage of Health 2.0.

After being at Health 2.0, I admit I have become more interested in new ideas and products, even if I am not endorsing any specific one (I am not). One thing that I really liked that is reflective of the Web2.0 world today is that the company posted a short video on YouTube, which I am pasting in here:

It’s a different way to experience something as opposed to going to the company’s web site – it’s kind of open source, publicly available, and other people can say what they thing of the product right there. I haven’t gotten a chance to use this yet because I am on a Mac running Windows Vista 64 Bit, but I am interested in the idea, and especially the idea that I wouldn’t have to reach for the anatomic atlas as I guide patients through a consultation about what’s going on their bodies.

Way back when, when I did a clerkship at the National Library of Medicine, I was exposed to the Visible Human Project, which you can read about on the National Library of Medicine’s Web Site. At the time, the images from that project comprised 18 Gigabytes of data (I remember this number, because it was so gargantuan). It’s interesting to see that we have come such a long way in being able to visualize our bodies like this.

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Ted Eytan, MD