Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Bassett Anatomical Image Collection Goes Online
Filed under: Net News
Stanford University has partnered with a company called eHuman to make available to the public one of the most impressive anatomical dissection image collections in the world. The Bassett collection, a work of David Bassett and William Gruber obsessively compiled and anotated more than 50 years ago, has been used for decades in medical schools as an aid in anatomy courses.
The first set of images hits computer screens this month, an online library that takes the one-of-a-kind collection of photographs and makes them available in a whole new format with highlighted labeling and audio narration.Think "Body Worlds," the traveling exhibit of preserved human bodies viewed by millions, but much larger, with more detail and geared toward providing an encyclopedic volume of information about the anatomy of the human body.
"The Bassett collection is simply the most beautiful dissection collection in existence," said Paul Brown, DDS, consulting associate professor of anatomy, referring to the 50-year-old collection of 1,547 photographs of serial dissections painstakingly annotated over a 17-year period. "The photographs are stunning."
After almost four years of work by School of Medicine researchers together with eHuman, a Silicon Valley company, the first set of images of the head and neck are now ready for public viewing online at eHuman.com. By summer, the rest of the human body will follow. The images are free to the Stanford community and available to the public for a minimal fee.
"This collection is designed for any student of anatomy, from a high-schooler, to a medical anatomist," said Brown, founder of eHuman, an anatomy dissection software company located in Portola Valley whose mission is to create the first "clickable" human, something akin to the Google Earth map project, but for the body.
More from Stanford Medical Center Report...
Selected Bassett Collection images on Flickr...
Full collection can be subscribed to at eHuman...
(hat tip: BoingBoing)
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