Visible Human Project

Project Description

Web-based interface (currently Java) to visualizations of digital images of the human body.

Paul Coddington, about 1-2%, unfunded.
Yuh-Jye (Michael) Chang, independent study student. Unfunded for this project, but as a result of his work on it, was funded as an RA for Geoffrey's CPS 616 class this semester.

Improved user interface based on suggestions from the National Library of Medicine.
Applet to be featured in 2 forthcoming books on Java.
Requests to host mirror sites in Europe and Australia.
Entered the applet in the Sun Java Contest.
NCSA Mirage project (Web-based collaboration using Java-based tools) requested source code to turn it into a collaborative system (multiple users share the interface and see the same view), to be demonstrated to the director of the National Institute of Health next week.

Emailed the director of the Visible Human project at the National Library of Medicine asking about the possibility of funding further work on the project. No reply yet.
If we get funding, Michael Chang will work on this for his PhD, extending the interface to other data (MRI, CT, Visible Woman), adding overlays to database information such as names of body parts (a la Interactive Journey), doing 3D visualization using VRML, etc.
If there is no funding available, we will just give them the code (if they want it).
Related possibility is to leverage this work to get funding for Java interface to Human Genome data. Loads of funding around for genome work, next round of proposals to NIH and NLM due in June.

Paul Coddington, paulc@npac.syr.edu, Mar 5 1996.