The “human phantom” has been created and posted online where anyone can conduct experiments on it from their laptops. But the story behind its creation is one worth telling. This highly detailed digital human was made from slicing up a real woman every one-third of a millimeter up to a 5000 slices.
The identity of the real women is mostly a mystery, and best remained so under the circumstances. All we know she that she lived up to an age of 59 in Maryland and suffered from obesity and her husband has kindly donated her body to the Visible Human Project, set up by the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
There have been created “phantom humans” in both male and female forms, although the male was cut at each millimeter and was finished years ago. Researchers seem to be more interested in the female digital model as it is of higher resolution and helps study diseases affecting women, such as it could help to improve breast cancer screening to give more reliable mammogram results.
The effect of long-term cellphone use on the brain is also being studied, and assessment of the safety of a brain stimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is being tested, which is being developed as a possible treatment for a range of conditions, including depression, dementia, schizophrenia and chronic pain. “We have a pretty good model of the brain, encased in a shell of cerebrospinal fluid,” says Sergey Makarov from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.
The Maryland woman’s obesity makes her particularly relevant, Makarov says, given the high levels of obesity in many countries today. But because the phantom is fully digital, the researchers have also been able to create two thinner versions, with less skin and fat.
“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 orthopedic surgeon at Harvard Medical School who is collaborating with Makarov.
“Sectioned colour images allow you to distinguish virtually all the anatomical structures we are made of,” says Silvia Farcito at the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies in Society, based in Zurich, Switzerland.
“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 former phantoms from MRI and CT scans are of living volunteers, but the resolution is poor, plus, any small movement blurs up the image of an already lengthy tiring scan. Most importantly, the existing scans are mostly colourless and colours are imperial to understanding tissues.
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Author:Technology Blog
