The Visible Human Project

This paper gives a flavor of Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg’s view of the expanding role of libraries, his curiosity, and his tolerance for taking educated risks, through the creation and nurturing of National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project. That project produced the Visible Man and Visible Woman datasets and a suite of tools for presenting and analyzing those and similar datasets. The results are used in teaching anatomy and other medical school courses and in software from the open-source Insight Tool Kit (ITK) that is included in many if not most volume-reconstructing systems. This story is a bit personal. From the beginning we recognized and understood each other since we were both “boys from Brooklyn”.