The National Library of Medicine has undertaken to provide a set of digitized images of the human body for use in education and research. The Visible Human Project will initially create a digital image data set of a complete human male and female cadaver, with digitized anatomical photographs, as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer tomography (CT) data.

The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University has obtained a copy of the Visible Human data set and is working on processing the raw data to produce two and three dimensional images that can be accessed over the Internet for educational purposes.

Currently the images are only available as two dimensional slices, via The NPAC Visible Human Viewer, an interactive graphical interface written in Java. The viewer is only accessible using Web browsers that support Java applets, such as Netscape 2.0.