Don’t want to dig up a body?

Image via Wikipedia

No problem! Google Body to the rescue! I stumbled upon this web software produced by Google Labs this morning while procrastinating on doing my pharmacology readings. This app does not have the great detail of Brain Maps that I reviewed. This is understandable though since Google Body deals with the whole body and not only the brain. That being said, Google Body does have an amazing level of detail and accuracy for being a 3D rendering of the human body, and interact-able rendering at that! I can’t begin to imagine the hours that went into coding and rendering this.

Google Body allows you to zoom in through different ‘layers’ on their 3D model of a human. Each layer is a different system: dermal layer, organs, nerves, skeletal, etc. It allow you to pan around the body and see things from different angles and zoom in to see things close up or far away. I was not as impressed with the limitations for panning, but then again I was trying to stick the camera vertically up the model’s spinal column by the neck area to try to get a look at the brain stem from below.

It’s really good piece of software though. I’m so glad I found this, and I hope you all can get something out of it!

UPDATE: You can do a search for different body parts, and then be taken to them on the model. How did I miss this?!

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Google Maps, but for brains!!

I just found this really awesome site while trying to find some more information on the Periaqueduct grey of the brain for pharmacology class(we covered neurological drugs last week). The site, Brain Maps, has occupied my attention for the last half hour or so now. I just love it! You can search for a specific part of the brain and it’ll return HD images that are labeled like Google Maps with markers. Each marker opens a bubble, when clicked, that has links to Pubmed searches on that brain part. You can look at non-tagged photos too. All the ones I’ve seen so far have been very good quality.

Awesome site! Definitely bookmarking this one for future classes. Now if only I could find a site like this for each body system. It makes it a lot easier to visualize things when you can interact with it. Seeing how I don’t have access to a cadaver yet this is the best I got.