Progress in research of digital human in China

Abstract

Human body is a large complex system which is composed a hundred trillion cells. Even though science and technology at 21st century are developing very fast, the human being knows himself very limited. Digital human project aims at building whole human body datasets, from nano to macro, including cells, DNA, tissue, organs and the system. The information may be anatomical, physical and functional, depending on the stage of the development of the database. The National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project (VHP) published male data set in 1994, which consists of digital magnetic resonance (MR), computed tomography (CT), and anatomic images derived from a single male cadaver. The data set is 15 gigabytes in size and is available from the National Library of Medicine under a no-cost license agreement. After one year, female data set of VHP finished with 30 GB data. Considering the race anatomical variance, the dataset of Visible Korean Human was characterized with oriental nationality. Chinese Digital Human research started in November 2001 as a National High Tech Research and Development Project. The first female data set was completed in February 2003. A Digital Human Research Consortium of China is responsible for coordinating the research activities about Chinese Digital Human in China. To date, several datasets of the whole human body in China are available. Using these datasets, many research works have been done, including some image processing methods such as multi-slice registration, reduction of noise and artifacts, and color image segmentation techniques. Also some new hybrid volume rendering methods based on parallel computing are developed for high resolution visualization. 3D reconstruction of the most tissue and organs of the female cadaver are completed. Some potential applications of Digital Human are also carried out.