DAWN WALTON. From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
May 31, 2007 at 12:22 PM EDT

CALGARY — The body of a man with his skull intact, but his skin pulled back and skeleton removed to display every vein, artery and internal organ, floats in a dark, cube-shaped room.

This one-of-a-kind virtual human, known as CAVEman, has more than 3,000 body parts catalogued by computer – each one anatomically perfect and ready to be manipulated at the click of a button.

“What you see is the tip of the iceberg,” says Andrei Turinsky, a research associate in the University of Calgary’s department of biochemistry and molecular biology.

For the first time, scientists have a complete computerized human atlas in four dimensions – length, width, height and time. CAVEman could hold the key to understanding complex diseases and human development, according to the Alberta researchers behind the project, who put it through its paces for the media yesterday.

The CAVEman system allows users to magnify, rotate, and zoom in or out on any image of the human body

Source: Globe & Mail

~LC