He may be gone, but he's not forgotten.
Scientists have used the cadaver of convicted murderer Joseph Jernigan to create the most detailed atlas of the human body ever assembled on a computer.
Funded by the National Library of Medicine, researchers at the University of Colorado embarked on an ambitious project: to digitize a complete human body. The result, the Visible Man, part of the Visible Human Project, is a computerized corpse assembled from photographs of cross-sections of Jernigan's body. Jernigan, executed by lethal injection in Texas in 1993, donated his body to science.
The research team, headed by scientists Victor Spitzer and David Whitlock, used a combination of specially designed milling and photography equipment to gather the visual data. The team sliced the body (which was frozen to ease cutting) into 1-millimeter cross sections. As each section was removed, the team photographed the newly exposed cross section of the body. By reassembling each of these slices digitally, the team was able to re-create Jernigan's body down to a 1-millimeter resolution. Using the computerized recon-struction, you can take a journey from the top of the head, through the center of the body, and down to the feet. Because it's been digitally reconstructed, the body can be viewed from any angle or sliced any way you'd like to see it.
And the Visible Man isn't just for the medical �lite: he's available for nothing over the Internet. Be warned, however: it would take around two uninterrupted weeks on a dedicated T1 line and a 16-Gbyte hard drive to download the 1,878 sections that make up the body. Users who want easy access to the complete image can also buy CD-ROMs of specific body parts for US$200 per CD.
The Visible Man solves the problem of previous 3-D medical models, which were inherently hollow. "There is no previous 3-D model based on real anatomy - just projections by medical illustrators of where things should be," Spitzer explains.
The Visible Human Project: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/extramural_research.dir/visible_human.html
SCANS
Digital Dead Man
United States of Identification
