The Transparent Body

This area focuses on the new ways digital imaging and sensing allow us to see the human body. From seeing your heat image in a thermograph or the bones of your hand in an ultrasound, to taking a virtual trip through the Visible Man, encounter extraordinary views of the body, as well as how we use this data to improve our health and wellness.

Inside Perspective

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, gives an inside view of you. An MRI makes pictures of the body's soft tissues with a powerful magnet, radio waves, and a computer. It can reveal a brain tumor, clogged blood vessels in a lung, or nerve damage in a spinal cord. An MRI is safe and painless, too. Climb inside a full-size model of an MRI machine, and hear the loud banging that patients sometimes hear, as well as the soft music played to soothe claustrophobic patients.

Thermocamera

See your body in a totally different kind of portrait through an infrared thermocamera – a camera that uses temperature instead of light to make a picture. Your video image is projected onto a large screen, for all to see.

Think you're cool? Notice the colors to find out! Warm areas show up as white, yellow, orange, or red. Cool places appear blue, purple, or black. How do your colors compare with someone else's?

Ultrasound Baby Album

Your first baby picture may have been a fuzzy ultrasound image taken before you were born. A trained specialist can look at these images and learn vital information about a growing baby.

In this multimedia program, you can see several ultrasound images of fetuses, and learn how to read the images just like a physician would.

Sensing with Sound

With ultrasound, a doctor can look at soft tissues inside the body. The patient doesn't need radiation, chemicals, surgery, or other invasive measures. In this multimedia program you view and analyze real ultrasound images of a human neck, heart, liver, kidney, hand and knee.

Visible Human

Take a step-by-step tour of the first complete virtual human body, consisting of over 1,878 separate images. Use one of two touch-screen monitors to select different views and animation of this anatomical data set. Some of the topics you can browse through include high-definition color images, a 3D body system fly-through, and information about how scientists made the model.

The Visible Human is used today by students to explore human systems, and supplies crucial data to help surgeons practice on simulated patients.

Spinning Images

Play with rotating sections of two life-size columns, to construct strange mix-and-match figures from medical images of the human body. Each imaging method reveals familiar and unusual patterns of the body's tissues and systems. Use a wall-mounted light box to closely examine an assortment of x-ray, CT, and MRI images from real patients.