National Library of Medicine, HTTP://www.nlm.nih.gov Communications Engineering Branch Title Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, HTTP://www.lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/
 

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Visible Embryo Project

Staff: Lewis E. Berman, Leif Neve, Anne Altemus

The Visible Embryo Project is a collaborative effort by the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Communications Engineering Branch (CEB), the Human Developmental Anatomy Center (HDAC) at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, D.C., and the National Institute of Child and Human Development to show how a collection of existing histological material could enhance medical research. One such collection, the Carnegie Collection of Human Development, consists of 10,000 human embryos spanning the 23 stages of embryo development. Many of the embryos have been sectioned and a small subset has been reconstructed using 3D visualization software. Accompanying this collection is a small textual database describing characteristics of 552 of the embryos.

The emphasis of this project is to provide data from this collection to researchers and students over the ubiquitous Internet. To do this we have leveraged the rapid prototyping capability of the World Wide Web (WWW) with public domain software for the client/server interaction, image and data conversion, and data storage in a relational database. Coupling this with a RAID storage device and a T3 connection to the Internet has made this a paradigm for the distribution of biomedical image and text information.

This project proved to be a valuable experience with respect to making a collection of multimedia biomedical information available over the Internet and the World Wide Web. We gained an understanding of how to effectively work in a wide area collaborative effort and how to use tools to support this effort.

In general this product will be useful to researchers and students, as noted in the alpha and beta surveys and feedback. The combination of images, 3D reconstructions, reprints, and especially the textual database will all help to promote learning in the area of human embryo development.
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URL: http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/embryo.php
Last updated September 15, 2004

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