… but your mate, he’s a bit blurry: only at 1mm. If you want a digital recreation of real people, they’re now available. The best? Of a woman who died two decades ago, as NewScientist‘s Jessica Hamzelou reports (26 September 2015, paywall):
Now the woman’s body has been recreated, in far greater detail. She has been digitised at a much higher resolution, thanks to the thinner slices used. The male cadaver was sectioned at 1 millimetre intervals; the woman at intervals of just a third of a millimetre. …
Their phantom is the most detailed digital reconstruction of a whole human body ever to be pieced together. She has 231 tissue parts, ranging from windpipe to eyeballs, but is missing nose cartilage and 14 other bits of the body.
How useful is it?
“They have ten times as much information as you’d get from an MRI scan,” says Fernando Bello, who develops simulations for medical procedures at Imperial College London. “It means the team will have much more information about organs and their structuring.”
The high resolution of the model makes it ideal for virtual experiments. Each of the woman’s tissues has a well-defined set of parameters, such as density and thermal conductivity. This makes it possible to compute the impact that radiation, for example, and various imaging techniques are likely to have on living tissues.
“The phantom gives us a great opportunity to study human tissues without having to do human studies, which are lengthy and expensive,” says Ara Nazarian, an orthopaedic surgeon at Harvard Medical School who is collaborating with Makarov.
Makarov’s team has already started running tests that are too risky to try on living people. In one, they gave their model a metal hip or femur, and studied the effect of putting it in an MRI scanner. Metal implants heat up in the scanner’s strong magnetic field, and little is known at present about how best to scan people who have them.
And this data is publicly available here from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. From their data page:
The dataset from the female cadaver has the same characteristics as the male cadaver with one exception. The axial anatomical images were obtained at 0.33 mm intervals instead of 1.0 mm intervals. This results in over 5,000 anatomical images. The female dataset is about 40 gigabytes in size. Spacing in the “Z” direction was reduced to 0.33 mm in order to match the pixel spacing in the “XY” plane which is 0.33 mm. This enables developers who are interested in three-dimensional reconstructions to work with cubic voxels.
This data is freely available. I wonder how well their physics engine works – and the appropriate metric for such a question.
