Engineering Animation Inc. (EAI), the Ames-based company known for the C2 virtual reality environment, is supplying a variety of entertainment and educational materials for the world at large.

EAI focuses on the manufacturing of custom animation products, interactive software products and animation software products.

EAI is responsible for the Dissectable Human (DH) CD-ROM, an interactive, 3D anatomical atlas of the human body, which features photorealistic renderings of the ten main bio-anatomical systems of the human body — the skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular, nervous, digestive, respiratory, endocrine, urinary, reproductive and lymphatic systems.

The Dissectable Human is based on actual cross-sectional images of a male human cadaver from the Visible Human project by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The body used was that of a convicted murderer in Texas who was put to death, said Carol Jacobson, senior director of business development for educational products at EAI.

The body was scanned using computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and then cut into slices one millimeter thick. The slices were photographed and scanned into a computer. The convict’s body became the first “visible male,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson said the convict was a good specimen because he was large, he had well defined muscles and no serious pathology except for one missing testicle. She said there is now a female body being used for construction of a “dissectable female.” The woman was not a convict but had willed her body to science following her death. The woman was post-menopausal, and therefore not the best specimen, Jacobson said.

EAI has developed proprietary algorithms which perform the 3D renderings of NLM’s Visible Human and can apply optical effects such as transparency and shadowing.

Users of the software can “peel away” organs to see what lies below, view structures of the body from many perspectives and enhance particular structures for further study, according to an EAI fact sheet on the DH CD-ROM.

“Most of the organs and systems are set up so you can rotate them in three dimensions,” Jacobson said. “It lets you rotate things, so you can look at them from the front, the back and the side.”

The program can provide a realistic educational supplement for live dissection for students in medical schools and in undergraduate universities and colleges. It can also provide medical professionals with a 3D visualization of the Visible Human data while demonstrating potential clinical applications of the imaging technologies being developed at EAI.

In the making of the Dissectable Human, EAI confirmed the existence of a recently discovered and previously unknown muscle in the human head. The sphenomandibularis, as the muscle is called, is featured and labeled in the program, and the muscle can now be studied by medical students and health care professionals.

“One of the greatest advantages of our products, including the Dissectable Human CD-ROM, is that they allow people to approach dissections from many non-traditional angles,” said Dr. Martin Vanderploeg, executive vice president of EAI, in a press release. “And by using data from actual human bodies, our products will always be anatomically accurate.”

The DH CD-ROM is being published by Mosby-Year Books. It is available for $49.95 for both PC and Mac systems through EAI’s website (http://www.eai.com), health science bookstores, or by contacting Mosby directly at (800) 426-4545. Two print atlases of the Dissectable Human are also available.