During a recent noon-hour visit to Apple headquarters, Dr. Robert Chase powered up his laptop, opening a previously unseen world of vivid color photographs.
“And suddenly there was a line of people waiting to put on the 3-D glasses and see the images,” he recalls. “What they really wanted to see was shoulders, hips, knees and cruciate ligaments—things [they had had] operated on.”
Chase, the Emile Holman Professor of Surgery, emeritus, is curator of the School of Medicine’s renowned Bassett collection of photographs of human dissection. The first set of images—of the head and neck—from a newly digitized version of the collection was released in February with whiz-bang interactive labels and narration by Chase.
“Optic pathways dissected in situ, viewed from above,” the surgeon intones, as a user rolls his mouse over a dissected eyeball. “External occipital protuberance, unusually prominent in this case,” Chase says, describing a compelling image of a saucer-shaped bone at the back of the skull.
The Bassett photographs are one-of-a-kind, Chase says. “It’s probably the best collection of anatomical dissection images there ever will be because no one else is going to spend the 17 years that David [Bassett] did.”
Beginning in 1948, Bassett, an associate professor of anatomy known for his meticulous dissections, invited William B. Gruber to photograph his work. A German immigrant who had built organs and pianos in Munich, Gruber had put his love of photography to commercial use by inventing the View-Master stereoscope, introduced in 1939. For 17 years, Gruber traveled back and forth between his home in Washington state and Stanford, where he would photograph Bassett’s dissections on Kodachrome 35mm film. “And then the films had to be sent to Rochester, New York, to be processed, which took a couple of weeks,” Chase says. “They reviewed them before Bassett took one more step in dissection and over the years assembled this enormous collection of images.”
In 1962, Bassett published A Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy, with 1,547 color stereo views of dissections of every region of the body. They were compiled on 221 View-Master reels tucked inside the back covers of the 23 hardbound volumes. “They have lasted beautifully through the years and are still pristine,” Chase says of the original photographs, now archived in the Medical School’s Lane Library. “I think David would be terribly pleased to see that the collection has survived, and that it’s now come into the new world of electronic imaging.”
That transformation comes through the efforts of endodontist Paul Brown, a consulting associate professor of anatomy who works out of the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center. Brown is also a co-founder of eHuman, a subsidiary of Brown & Herbranson Imaging in Portola Valley. “The raw images and annotations in analog, traditional form are wonderful, but it’s difficult to make use of them,” says eHuman CEO Bob Austrian. “We digitize them and make them available in low- or high-res [images], and then enrich the experience by creating rollovers and audio.” The public can view sample images at eHuman.com.
So who’s the audience for the revamped Bassett collection? “Medical students or any students of anatomy, including nurses, physical therapists and chiropractors,” says Brown. Bassett’s original annotations are being updated in text boxes that explain the surgical significance of, say, a muscle. Clicking on a box, he says, will “tell you the origin, function, blood supply and enervation” of a particular structure.
The colors, still striking 50 years later, derive from Bassett’s techniques for preserving cadavers for dissection. He used “a special preparation that preserved the color—that had in it some of the same materials that keep corned beef reddish,” says Chase. Bassett injected blue-colored latex into veins and red into arteries, carefully preserving every structure. “It makes some of the images almost too complex because of the preservation of every little nerve and vessel.”
All the easier to find those aging anterior cruciate ligaments.
