Chinese visible human project: dataset acquisition and its primary applications.

The research on digital visible human is of great significance and application value. The US Visible Human Project (VHP) created the first digital image data set of a complete human (one male and one female) in 1995. To promote a worldwide application-oriented VHR, more visible human data sets representative of different populations of the world are in demand. The Chinese Visible Human (CVH) male (created in Oct. 2002) and female (created in Feb. 2003) project achieved greater integrity of images, easier blood vessel identification, and were free of organic lesion. The most noteworthy technical advance of CVH Project was the construction of a low temperature laboratory, which contributed to the prevention of small structures (including teeth, concha nasalis, and articular cartilage) from falling off out of the milling surface. Thus, better integrity of images can be ensured. So far, we have achieved an acquisition of five CVH data sets and the corresponding volume visualization on PC. The 3D reconstruction of some organs or structures has been finished. The work of segmentation on a complete data set is still on-going.