Living Human Project

The release, some years ago, of the Visible Human (VH) dataset made it possible, for the first time, to access anatomical information without compromises. This produced a significant momentum in many areas but, after a little time, it became clear that, while the dissection approach used in the VH project ensured extreme quality, it also lacked many aspects that other forms of data contain. These include in vivo data collection, multi-subject, gender, sex, and age variations, lack of connection with functional information, no pathology, etc. To put it simply – he was only a single human, and he is dead. We do not know how he breathed, walked, swallowed, digested – the VH data totally lacks multiplicity and functionality.

Many research projects have been carried out in Europe over the last few years, some with the support of the European Commission, to try to circumvent some of these limitations. A basic aspect possessed by the VH project, and lacking in all these other projects, is completeness. The VH project relates ONLY to the normal anatomy of one human subject, and provides ALL the anatomical information for that subject. The other projects had wider objectives, but lacked completeness. Some focused only on pathological data, others only on the lower limb, others again only on the modelling of functional aspects. Because of the lack of the necessary critical mass, none has dared to search for completeness.

The Living Human Project will develop a worldwide, distributed repository of anatomo-functional data and of simulation algorithms, fully integrated into a seamless simulation environment and directly accessible by any researcher in the world. This will establish Europe as the leader in the area of human functional modelling, directly challenging the USA Visible Human Project and related initiatives.

The objective is patient-specific bio-numerics (-mechanics, -electromagnetics, etc.) and image-processing (both for pre-processing & visualisation) for the complete human body, with integration of individual systems through hierarchical approaches at the algorithmic level and through middleware operating across distributed systems for Grid computing, using a semantic web to manage the information. The focus of the Grid approach is to provide services to medical or clinical users, removing any need for them to have to handle the details of the computing systems or simulation methods.

For more information refer to the project web site or to the LHDL Building.