Anatomography is an interactive website which supports generating anatomical diagrams and animations of the
human body. The Anatomography website is maintained by the DBCLS (Database Center for Life Science) non-profit research institute located at the
University of Tokyo. Anatomical diagrams generated by Anatomography, and 3D polygon data used on the website (called BodyParts3D), are freely available under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.[2]
Human body polygon data used in the site are called "BodyParts3D".[3] BodyParts3D polygon data are extracted from full-body
MRI images. The MRI image set that BodyParts3D is based on is called "TARO".
Taro is a common given name for males in Japanese, as
John is in English. TARO is a 2mm * 2mm * 2mm
voxel dataset of the human male created by the
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.[4] TARO was published freely in November, 2004.[5][6]
The construction process of BodyParts3D is as follows.[3]
Phase 1: Additional anatomical segmentations were introduced in the original TARO data.
Phase 2: Then, missing details were supplemented and blurred contours were clarified using a 3D editing program by referring to textbooks, atlases,[7] and mock-up models by medical illustrators.
Phase 3: Further segmentation and data modification will continue in collaboration with clinical researchers until sufficient concept coverage is achieved.
BodyParts3D polygon data are distributed in the
OBJ file format. The entire data file's size is 127
MB (polygon reduced) and 521 MB (high quality) as of version 3.0.[8] The number of body parts (organs) registered in BodyParts3D is 1,523 as of version 3.0.[7]
License
Images generated by Anatomography and the polygon data included in BodyParts3D are licensed under the
Creative Commons license,[2] in hope of widening usage and democratizing medical knowledge.[9]
Diagrams from Anatomography are used, for example, in Canadian science TV show
Le code Chastenay,[12] Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, as lecture material in universities, and elsewhere to share knowledge.[9] About usage of Anatomography on websites like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, developers say "spreading of usages by anonymous users on like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons is what we had expected."[9]
Technical features
BodyParts3D/Anatomography project uses the
Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). The FMA is an open-source anatomical
ontology developed and maintained by the Structural Informatics Group at the
University of Washington. In BodyParts3D, each body-part is managed by an FMA identifier (FMAID) defined by the FMA. For example, the
vertebral column is registered as FMA13478, the
temporal lobe is registered as FMA61825, and so on.
Zygote Body - Free web service provided by the
Zygote Media Group located in American Fork, Utah, US. Zygote Body was launched as Google Body on December 15, 2010. The polygon data used on the website is a commercial product. As of October, 2012, the price of its full-body polygon data is $13,995.[16]
BioDigital Human - Free web service and commercial product provided by
BioDigital, Inc. located in New York, New York, US. The BioDigital Human was published in 2011. The web site won a SXSW Interactive Award in 2013.
^Nagaoka, T; Watanabe, S; Sakurai, K; Kunieda, E; Watanabe, S; Taki, M; Yamanaka, Y (2004). "Development of realistic high-resolution whole-body voxel models of Japanese adult males and females of average height and weight, and application of models to radio-frequency electromagnetic-field dosimetry". Physics in Medicine and Biology. 49 (1): 1–15.
Bibcode:
2004PMB....49....1N.
doi:
10.1088/0031-9155/49/1/001.
PMID14971769.
^
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「BodyParts3DとAnatomography: 医学での情報共有を「動機付ける」素材」(in Japanese)[permanent dead link] シンポジウム「ライフサイエンスの未来へ~10年先のデータベースを考える~」/ Nobutaka Mitsuhashi, Kaori Fujieda, Shio Imai, Isamu Muto, Takuro Tamura, Shoko Kawamoto, Toshihisa Takagi and Kousaku Okubo "BodyParts3D and Anatomography: Materials motivating sharing information in medicine" Poster presentation at "Symposium: Toward the Future of Life Science - Thinking Databases of 10 Years Later" held in the University of Tokyo at 2010-10-05. Retrieved 2012-10-12.