Educational Illustration: Interactive Ear Visualization

One of our readers, Bryan James, sent in a tip regarding an example of educational illustration to visualize the anatomy and function of the human ear for a hearing aid company. He writes:

 I wondered if you would be interested in a medical anatomy interactive web page we produced recently called The Interactive Ear. The site can be found here: http://www.amplifon.co.uk/interactive-ear/index.html The site essentially takes a user through the 3 major parts of the ear in an engaging and distinctive manner, naming all of the major parts as well as having a unique feature called The Journey – By clicking the pulsing circle, a user is taken through how sound travels within the ear and towards the brain and what happens to the elements inside.

The interactive illustration provides an overview of ear anatomy and uses a magic lens to reveal the path that sound travels through the ear. While it is not the typical medvis we feature on this site, it is interesting to see how anatomical illustrations like these can be presented interactively on the web.

Neuron-level brain-activity map: the Larval Zebrafish edition

Nature recently reported that for the first time, researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells. For this, they have used a larval Zebrafish that is genetically engineered to have their neurons fluoresce when nerve cells fire. By putting this fish under a special microscope, full brain activity can be recorded every 1.3 seconds. An hour of these recordings adds up to a Terabyte of data. Let’s take a look at some of this pretty data right here: