Development of an electronic lung airway atlas

In its most traditional sense, a road atlas is a book that displays towns, cities, counties, states, and the highways and interstates that travel through and across them. An anatomical book atlas serves a similar purpose by systematically illustrating and labeling anatomical structures such as the brain, heart, and lungs. While a book atlas is adequate for learning the fundamental aspects of anatomical structures, it fails to offer some important features such as three dimensional display and user interaction that would significantly increase its usefulness.

A lot of work has been done the last few decades to create atlases of the brain. However, much less attention has been focused on other body sites, such as the lungs. This talk will focus on the development of an atlas for researching both human and rat lungs. The atlas is intended to be general purpose so that additional species can be studied in the future using the same tool. An incremental software engineering model was incorporated which allows for multiple versions of the atlas to be released as successive improvements and modifications are made.