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Bony Pelvis
Lecture I. provides an overview of the pelvic structures
and their relationships to each other and other anatomical regions.
It begins with an illustration of the bony pelvis and all of its important
landmarks. Therefore, the first step in the development of our Pelvic Anatomy
Lesson was to extract the pelvic bones from sections of the Visible Human.
The sectioned bones were used to generate a three dimensional representation
of the pelvis that can be rotated in space
[Figure 1].
The advantage of extracting bones from the Visible Human compared to other
three-dimensional representations of the pelvic bones (see below) is that
it can serve as a framework for the addition of other pelvic structures
(muscle, viscera, neurovascular bundles) and for the demonstration of the
true relationships of these structures to one another.
When a three-dimensional object was generated from
the Visible Human pelvic bones, we were surprised to find the image was
both too complex yet lacked sufficient detail. The complexity is a consequence
of the technique used to reconstruct the 3D image from the sections.
Because the algorithm used to generate the images preserves the surface
texture and color of the segmented object, the surface of the pelvic bones
was disfigured by portions of muscle tissue that were also segmented because
of their proximity to the bony surface. This is one area where our
visualization method of the the Visible Human data may not provide
an advantage over other means of illustrating the bony pelvis, unless we
choose to use pseudocoloring to replace the texturing with the original
color of the tissue. Absence of detail is a consequence of the lack of
shadows in the three-dimensional images of the Visible Human.
For comparative purposes we generated a movie of
a model of the pelvic bones [Figure 2] by digital
photography. This movie was also used as a framework for illustrations
showing the relationship of the pelvic diaphragm to the bony pelvis.
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