"Cross-sectional anatomy is increasingly important given the expanded use of imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computerized Tomography (CT)," says Professor McNulty (right) of Loyola University's Strich School of Medicine. (Photograph by David Walberg)

t used to be that John McNulty, a professor of anatomy at Loyola University in Chicago, only had textbook images when he wanted to show human anatomy to his first-year medical students. Now, thanks to the Internet, McNulty's students can tap into the Visible Human Project, a complete digital image library of the human body set up by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Its most stunning feature: complete cross-sections from both a male and a female cadaver.

Instead of turning to textbooks, medical students can now download images from the Visible Man and examine organs, bones, tissue, and muscle, millimeter by millimeter. Joseph Paul Jernigan, a convicted murderer executed in 1994 who donated his body to science, is the first human to exist in cyberspace. In August 1996, the Visible Woman, sliced at an even finer thickness of 0.3 millimeters, will join Jernigan.


The Visible Human project enables medical students to view the entire anatomy, whether bones, muscle or tissue, millimeter by millimeter (Photograph by David Walberg)

McNulty downloads the Visible Human images through the Loyola University Medical Education Network and projects them onto a screen during lectures. Students view the images individually in the computer-aided learning lab and at home using their personal Internet accounts.

"Cross-sectional anatomy is increasingly important for practicing physicians to know well, particularly with expanded use of imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT)," said McNulty. "With the Visible Human Project, Loyola medical students can easily correlate, point-for-point, between the actual sections and the corresponding CT and MRI taken at that level. Before the Visible Human, we could never do such a direct correlation.

"Obviously, the better we train our students to understand the anatomical relationships seen in MRIs and CTs, the better they will be able to diagnose and treat their future patients.


http://www.nlm.nih.gov:80/research/visible/visible_human.htm


Please direct all inquiries to: cyber24rs@aol.com
©1996, 24 Hours in Cyberspace Inc., All Rights Reserved.