Visible Embryo Project - Summary of Goals

The Visible Embryo

Summary of Goals

The term "metacenter" was coined several years ago by Larry Smarr, the Director of the National Center for Super computing Applications, to propose network-based computing and information "centers" that actually represent transparently coordinated access to widely distributed computational and database resources. Although the user accesses this resource through a single client program running on his/her own personal computer or workstation, the system provides access to a wide variety of supercomputers and data stores that can reside anywhere in the world with a high-speed Internet connection.

The Visible Embryo Project is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research project to develop such a large-scale distributed computational resource "center" to support research, education, and health care relating to developmental biology. A primary goal of this project is to provide a testbed for the development of new technologies, and the refinement of existing ones, for the application of high-speed, high-performance computing and communications to current problems in biomedical science.

Sets of serial microscopic cross-sections through human embryos, within the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, will be digitized and processed to create volumetric reconstructions of normal human embryonic anatomy. During the five years of this initial project, a significant portion of the Museum's Carnegie Collection of Human Embryology, over 600 embryos in all, will be digitized, reconstructed and archived, together with case histories, scientific articles, research notes, didactic descriptions, and other data contained within the collection. This massive database will be housed in the Museum at Washington D.C., while teams of researchers at more than 20 universities and companies around the United States will access widely distributed super computing resources to develop visualization, analysis and telecollaboration software tools, educational materials, virtual reality simulations, basic science investigations, and clinical research projects based upon the data contained within the collection.

This project will serve the dual purpose of providing a testbed for new technology development in high performance computing and communications, as well as creating powerful new tools for the developmental biology research community. New advances in visualization technology are beginning to allow investigators to break through previous technical limitations and discover universally-applicable rules for pattern formation and shape development in organisms. By applying these new technologies to the existing archives of cross-sectional image information that exist in the literature and in collections around the world, we can tap into an enormous amount of new information that can be extracted from these databases.

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