The Unified Anatomical Human

Abstract

In the course of anatomical research, anatomists acquire and attempt to organize a great deal of heterogeneous data from different sources, such as MRI and CT data, cryosections, immunohistochemistry, manual and automatic segmentations of various structures, related literature, the relations between all of these items, and so forth. Anatomical variation between subjects further complicates this organization. Currently, there is no way of storing, accessing and visualizing these heterogeneous datasets in an integrated fashion. Such capabilities would have great potential to empower anatomy research. In this work, we present methods for the integration of heterogeneous spatial and non-spatial data from different sources, as well as the complex relations between these, into a single model with standardized anatomical coordinates: The Unified Anatomical Human. All captured data can then be interactively visualized in various ways, depending on the anatomical question. Furthermore, our model enables data to be queried both structurally, i.e., relative to existing anatomical structures, and spatially, i.e., with anatomical coordinates. When new patient-specific medical scans are added to the model, all available model information can be mapped to them. Using this mapping, model information can be transferred back to the new scans, thus enabling the creation of visualizations enriched with information not available in the scans themselves.