About VOXEL-MAN

The VOXEL-MAN project dates back to about 1985, when a research group led by Professor Karl Heinz Höhne at the former Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science in Medicine (Institut für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in der Medizin, IMDM), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, made their first experiments on 3D visualization of tomographic volume data. As one of the results, the first ever 3D reconstruction of a brain of a living human being could be presented.

In the 1990s, combination of spatial models with a symbolic description led to a new representation of medical knowledge, which was used for building a new kind of atlases of anatomy, function, and radiological appearance of the human body. With the availability of the Visible Human data, this could later be combined with newly developed methods for segmentation and visualization, providing state of the art renderings of the anatomy in life-like colors. Among others, this work led to the products VOXEL-MAN 3D-Navigator: Brain and Skull, VOXEL-MAN 3D-Navigator: Inner Organs (both published by Springer) and EUS meets VOXEL-MAN (available from Hitachi Medical Systems).

Since 2005, the developers of VOXEL-MAN form a separate entity within the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, called the VOXEL-MAN Group. In close cooperation with clinical partners, a first prototype of a surgery simulator which combines unsurpassed visual realism and haptic feedback could be developed. Together with Spiggle & Theis, a leading manufacturer and distributor in ENT medicine and head surgery, it was transformed into a marketable product, the VOXEL-MAN TempoSurg simulator for surgical access to the inner ear. Currently, several surgery simulators for other applications are being developed. As the latest addition to the series of anatomical atlases, VOXEL-MAN 3D-Navigator: Upper Limb was published by Springer in late 2008.

In 2009, the VOXEL-MAN Group received an EXIST-Forschungstransfer grant from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) for the development of a dental simulator.