Notebook

After 2 1/2 years of looking, the Visible Human Project at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Md., settled recently on the cadavers of a 38-year-old man and a 59-year-old woman to represent the online human body. Using digitized photography, computerized tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging in 1 mm sections of the cadavers, the project will build a 42-gigabyte, three-dimensional image database of the two for distribution over the Internet. Project planners hope to combine the imaging data with other types of information--journal articles, for example--using interlinked information structures. According to project officer Michael J. Ackerman at NLM, investigators had some difficulty finding the "average" man and woman between the ages of 20 and 60 that they needed: two individuals who were healthy but had died suddenly without physical trauma. It seems that far more men than women die in this way, usually from drug overdoses, he says. ...