WPI team creates virtual human

Courtesy WPI professor Sergey Makarov poses in front of a poster depicting the virtual human. Makarov led the team that developed the virtual human, which may be useful in testing medical procedures that are too risky to perform on the living.

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By Emily Micucci

Engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have developed a virtual human by digitizing and combining high-resolution images of thin slices of an actual human body, WPI announced Tuesday.

Known as a computational human phantom, the digital mode can be used to conduct virtual medical procedures and medical experiments, without the need for human subjects. This allows researchers to conduct procedures that are too risky to be performed on living people, according to WPI, filling an important need for the medical community. WPI researchers have teamed up with faculty at Harvard Medical School to test the technology’s effectiveness for these purposes.

The model is the product of more than four years of work using proprietary software developed by Sergey Makarov, a WPI professor of electrical and computer engineering at WPI. It was developed using high-resolution color photographs of 5,000 cross-sectional slices of a human cadaver, a Maryland woman who had donated her body to science. The images were created by the National Library of Medicine, which made them available to Makarov.

His team then used a variety of image processing techniques to align the images and digitally stitch them into a three-dimensional human body. The model contains detailed information about the location and characteristics of the many tissues that make up the body’s organs and systems.