The world’s first three-dimensional full colour atlas of the knee, the first step in a project to display for manipulating a computer simulation of the entire human body, has been unveiled by the creators at the University of Colorado; organs will be frozen and then sliced at intervals of as little as a quarter of a millimeter and the photograph taken will be fed into a computer which assembles the image into three dimensions: the atlas of the knee is based on 6,000 images and will be used to compare images of patients taken with various medical scanning techniques; it is possible to view any angle though the atlas and in addition the image can be warped to show the wearing or degeneration of organs as they age.
