Virtual human – a living cadaver – pushes boundaries of anatomical science(2018)

Summary

When Victor Spitzer, PhD, director of the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, talks about his friend Susan Potter, he often describes her as “persistent.” Persistent because she refused to take no for an answer when she volunteered to donate her body to his Visible Human Project. Persistent because, after he accepted her request, she kept pushing when Spitzer initially refused to show her the large freezer where he stores cadavers, and the equipment he used to grind them into slices nearly the width of a human hair. ‘We need to bring her back to life, to develop a living cadaver.’ – Victor Spitzer Now, almost four years after she died from heart disease, Potter persists in a most profound way. She’s been frozen, sectioned and sliced — all in support of medical education. And now she exists in 27,000 photos taken of her entire anatomy, which is gradually being assembled in high-resolution digital form. Deep within the Fitzsimons Building, Spitzer sits in his laboratory which is festooned with roses on walls outside the freezer; the paintings were done by two students in the master’s program in Modern Human Anatomy. Potter, who was known as the flower lady at the Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard location of the CU Health Sciences Center, requested that flowers be kept near Spitzer’s freezer, a place she always felt needed some brightening. “I would think Susan is smiling because she ended up where she wanted,” Spitzer said. “She wanted to end up in the students’ minds.” That’s the abridged version of an unusual story. National Geographic: 14 years on a single story This is what Potter read in a newspaper about the National Library of Medicine-supported Visible Human project some 25 years ago: A CU team led by Spitzer and David G. Whitlock, MD, PhD, had sectioned off, from head to toe, both a male and female cadaver, using a calibrated machine to grind off layers to as small as one-third of a millimeter. Each layer of the bo...