Open Anatomy, the hip new anatomy book

April 23, 2017

Open Anatomy was going to be an anatomy atlas that belongs to everyone. Take the old public-domain plates, put pins on the structures, and let anyone fix a pin or add one, the way anyone can fix a Wikipedia article or a street on OpenStreetMap. The first note about it, from March 2017, is a data model under the heading "abstract fucking anatomy thing app": a body part has images, an image has areas, an area has a pin and an excerpt.

On this day the idea got its first material. Six plates from Poirier and Charpy's Traité d'anatomie humaine, in the University of Toronto scan on the Internet Archive, cropped and recoloured in GIMP, and a WordPress site on localhost to put them in. The site never got past the default theme. Its one page of real content says:

this is where you can select any image to learn with

An engraved anatomical plate of branching vessels and dotted glands on cream paper, recoloured so the vessels run through a rainbow from green on the left through blue and purple to red, yellow and green on the right. The engraver's signature, E. Salle sc., is at the lower left — One of the six plates, recoloured in GIMP on 23 April 2017. The engraving is from the book; the colours are mine.

Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Open Anatomy

The idea came back in August 2019 as a set of diagrams. One puts the three side by side on a line: Wikipedia, then OpenStreetMap, then Open Anatomy, with "higher complexity" pointing one way and "bigger target audience" pointing the other. Next to the users it says "even smaller group than OSM with even higher dev cost". The same sheet plans a "Sobotta app" and an "Unreal VR editor/viewer".

A handwritten table headed How do open data platforms work? with three columns. Wikipedia: anyone can edit, there are reviews eventually esp. on important high-traffic articles, all you need is an account. OSM: meetups to edit, add POIs etc., free hosting from openstreetmap.org, paid hosting plus frameworks plus APIs e.g. Mapbox, lots of software for editing, frameworks and backends for rendering and delivering files. Open Anatomy: local study circles at med schools, commercial non-open providers: biohuman, free hosting def. possible, all you need is an account — "How do open data platforms work?", 20 August 2019. The Open Anatomy column has study circles at medical schools where OpenStreetMap has its mapping meetups.

Two of the sketches are the app itself. In the learning mode you get the name of a structure, "clavicula", and have to find its pin on the plate. In the edit view the pins can be dragged, and a side pane takes the label, a link to an article, tags and synonyms.

A sketch of the pin learning mode: a rough drawing of bones in a frame with three red pins, a box at the top reading clavicula labelled name of structure to be found, zoom buttons top right, click-drag to pan image below. On the right: info needed: image file, json containing pins with position, label and link to article, name of view or lesson, maybe different pins for different difficulty levels — "pin-learning-mode", 20 August 2019.

Why 2D

Three months later, in November 2019, four more pages of notes. They start with the smallest version that could work:

Let's say we have Gray's anatomy. So maybe 500 pictures. If I could label like 5 of them and put them online as a proof of concept.

Then money, "I really need 'less' money in the sense of no VC or sth. Enough to live is fine. Like Jimmy Wales said.", and the interface: "But UI isn't important, getting it out there is." One page argues with itself:

"But Patrick, aren't there already better, 3D solutions?"
Well, yes and no. There also were encyclopedias before Wikipedia. […]
But Wikipedia is free and open.

It's also funny that everyone's trying to "solve" 3D and get fame instead of just creating a highly usable 2D version.

The last round of notes is from February 2021. The target group is "med students, low income but not only", the product is "the hip, new anatomy book", and the brief for the look is "Make old look new and cool and fresh". The list of things it should not be has two lines: "extensive 3d-model" and "connection to commercial books, linking to sales bullshit". Companies were welcome to build on the data, "like mapbox does it for open street maps", and the notes take the comparison further than they need to:

Open street maps has a similar problem. Which satellite images to use? […] What happens when continental plates move?

An engraved cross-section of a human head, recoloured in deep red with the lines and cavities picked out in cyan and blue — Another of the 2017 plates. Most of the six got a colour scheme of their own.

plates: six from Poirier and Charpy, volume 4, with their GIMP files, 23 April 2017
site: a WordPress export from localhost, same day, default theme
sketches: six diagrams from 20 August 2019, four pages of notes from 27 November 2019
notes: a data model (March 2017), a design doc with an API sketch (September 2019), a feature list (February 2021)
code: pseudo-code in the notes; the function that was going to draw a pin is empty

Still rough

None of it became an app. The proof of concept, five labelled plates online, did not happen in those four years. The 2017 data model ends with void displaySinglePin (Canvas, x, y) {}, and that is as close as a pin got to the screen.

In October 2026 an overnight agent run took the six plates out of the folder, turned their printed labels into data and built a small viewer around them, with the learning mode from the sketch as a quiz, plus seven plates from the 1918 edition of Gray's. That one can be opened.

Open the 2026 atlas13 plates, explore and quiz