The NLM Visible Human Project® has created publicly-available complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of a human male body and a human female body. Specifically, the VHP provides a public-domain library of cross-sectional cryosection, CT, and MRI images obtained from one male cadaver and one female cadaver. The Visible Man data set was publicly released in 1994 and the Visible Woman in 1995.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html

This dataset corresponds to a collection of images and/or image-derived data available from National Cancer Institute Imaging Data Commons (IDC) [1]. This dataset was converted into DICOM representation and ingested by the IDC team. You can explore and visualize the corresponding images using IDC Portal here: NLM-Visible-Human-Project. You can use the manifests included in this Zenodo record to download the content of the collection following the Download instructions below.

Collection description

The NLM Visible Human Project [2] has created publicly-available complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of a human male body and a human female body. Specifically, the VHP provides a public-domain library of cross-sectional cryosection, CT, and MRI images obtained from one male cadaver and one female cadaver. The Visible Man data set was publicly released in 1994 and the Visible Woman in 1995.

The data sets were designed to serve as (1) a reference for the study of human anatomy, (2) public-domain data for testing medical imaging algorithms, and (3) a test bed and model for the construction of network-accessible image libraries. The VHP data sets have been applied to a wide range of educational, diagnostic, treatment planning, virtual reality, artistic, mathematical, and industrial uses. About 4,000 licensees from 66 countries were authorized to access the datasets. As of 2019, a license is no longer required to access the VHP datasets.

Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Release of this collection by IDC does not indicate or imply that NLM has endorsed its products/services/applications. Please see the Visible Human Project information page to learn more about the images and to obtain any supporting metadata for this collection. Note that this collection may not reflect the most current/accurate data available from NLM.

Citation guidelines can be found on the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions information page.

Files included

A manifest file's name indicates the IDC data release in which a version of collection data was first introduced. For example, collection_id-idc_v8-aws.s5cmd corresponds to the contents of the collection_id collection introduced in IDC data release v8. If there is a subsequent version of this Zenodo page, it will indicate when a subsequent version of the corresponding collection was introduced.

1. nlm_visible_human_project-idc_v19-aws.s5cmd: manifest of files available for download from public IDC Amazon Web Services buckets
2. nlm_visible_human_project-idc_v19-gcs.s5cmd: manifest of files available for download from public IDC Google Cloud Storage buckets
3. nlm_visible_human_project-idc_v19-dcf.dcf: Gen3 manifest (for details see https://learn.canceridc.dev/data/organization-of-data/guids-and-uuids)

Note that manifest files that end in -aws.s5cmd reference files stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) buckets, while -gcs.s5cmd reference files in Google Cloud Storage. The actual files are identical and are mirrored between AWS and GCP.

Download instructions

Each of the manifests include instructions in the header on how to download the included files.

To download the files using .s5cmd manifests:

1. install idc-index package: pip install --upgrade idc-index
2. download the files referenced by manifests included in this dataset by passing the .s5cmd manifest file: idc download manifest.s5cmd.

To download the files using .dcf manifest, see manifest header.

Acknowledgments

Imaging Data Commons team has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Task Order No. HHSN26110071 under Contract No. HHSN261201500003l.

References

[1] Fedorov, A., Longabaugh, W. J. R., Pot, D., Clunie, D. A., Pieper, S. D., Gibbs, D. L., Bridge, C., Herrmann, M. D., Homeyer, A., Lewis, R., Aerts, H. J. W., Krishnaswamy, D., Thiriveedhi, V. K., Ciausu, C., Schacherer, D. P., Bontempi, D., Pihl, T., Wagner, U., Farahani, K., Kim, E. & Kikinis, R. National Cancer Institute Imaging Data Commons: Toward Transparency, Reproducibility, and Scalability in Imaging Artificial Intelligence. RadioGraphics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1148/rg.230180

[2] Spitzer, V., Ackerman, M. J., Scherzinger, A. L. & Whitlock, D. The visible human male: a technical report. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 3, 118–130 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1136/jamia.1996.96236280