Symposium on computer modelling for anatomists and clinicians

The following review articles are based on presentations given at a Symposium on Computer Modelling for Anatomists and Clinicians held in July 1997 at the Department of Anatomy, University of Edinburgh. The Symposium formed part of the Summer Meeting of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. There were 6 invited speakers, and 4 of these have produced review articles which are published in this issue of the Journal. In 3 of the presentations, recent advances in the use of 3D methodology to analyse mouse and human developmental anatomy were described. The reviews by Kaufman et al. and Baldock et al. (the latter to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal) complement each other in that they describe different aspects of a collaborative project (the Mouse Atlas Project, or MAP) involving the preparation of a text database of mouse developmental anatomy and a digital Atlas of normal mouse development. In the first of these presentations the principles underlying the methodology employed to reconstruct a range of early post-implantation mouse embryos spanning the stages between the primitive streak and the early limb-bud that had previously been serially sectioned was briefly described. Because of the efficiency of the computer technology involved (termed the warping program), the grey level images of the embryo histology could be arbitrarily resectioned to view the embryo as if sectioned in any orientation. Furthermore, all anatomically-defined tissues could be individually delineated (or painted) and viewed either in isolation or in combination with other appropriately labelled tissues and organs.