Skully an educational web application for the human skull

Abstract

One fundamental topic in anatomy is the structure of the human skull. Common sources for studying are books, atlases and other two dimensional material which makes it hard to optimally locate the separate parts of the human skull in three dimensional space and understand the relations between them. We developed a browser application visualizing three dimensional models of the human skull. The user can interact with those models, e.g. move them freely to gain insight in the three dimensional structure and position of the single bones, highlight separate bones or groups of them and view textual annotations. In a developer mode those annotations can be edited easily by anatomy experts or course tutors to contain all relevant information. Furthermore the application is platform independent, it can used on e.g. computers with different operating systems, tablets and mobile phones.