Christian Petersen
Project Summary
This is the first major project undertaken by the IVL and one which has a very broad area of potential applications in many disciplines. This project also coordinates very well with the base mission of Idaho State University in the health sciences. In this project, virtual copies have been made of every bone in the human skeleton. The skeleton used resides in the ISU Department of Anthropology and represents a male skeleton from India. All individual skeletons have their own individual variation from what the textbooks would consider to be a perfect skeleton and this skeleton is no exception. For example, the last (12th) rib never developed in the individual and as such was unavailable for scanning.
The results of the project are a complete virtual skeleton of this individual. This is not to be considered a complete copy of the skeleton because all bilaterally symmetrical bones have been generated using the best skeletal element for each bone, which has been mirror-imaged to provide the equivalent on the other side of the individual. For example, we scanned the best radius we had, the one from the left side, and mirrored it to produce a right radius. However, the right humerus was better preserved than the left so we scanned that and mirrored it to produce a left humerus. Within this procedure, therefore, we now have a complete human skeleton for use in basic education, outreach or research - with the exception of the 12th rib which will hopefully be part of a second available skeleton.
The result of this effort is a large number of data files of various formats and in different resolutions depending on the need. For each bone we now have individual files and are generating accessory files for various applications, including a lower resolution complete skeleton - a composite with all bones loaded into one figure - that can be used within many contexts.