The Unified Medical Language System (http://umlsks.nlm.nih.gov) is a repository of biomedical vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The UMLS integrates over 2 million names for some 900,000 concepts from more than 60 families of biomedical vocabularies, as well as 12 million relations among these concepts. Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus include the NC...

Seen in long-term perspectiye the discovery of X-rays and their use as a diagnostic agent must surely rank as one of the major advances in medicine, Though of less immediate practical benefit than were either anaesthesia or antisepsis, the scientific importance was greater and even now, after more than fifty years, new techniques are still being evolved with resulting increases in knowledge. Am...

Johann-Christian Reil (1759-1813) was a prominent German physician, anatomist, physiologist and a professor at the Universities of Halle and Berlin. Anatomic features named after him include the island of Reil (insula), Beau-Reil cross furrows, Reil's finger, the fillet of Reil, and Reil's triangle. In 1795, he founded the first German journal of physiology, Archiv für die Physiologie. Later, h...

Jelena Krmpotić-Nemanić (1921-2008) was a world-famous anatomist, internationally distinguished otolaryngologist, a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences & Arts and appreciated professor at the School of Medicine University of Zagreb. The founding influence in her scientific career came from her mentor Drago Perovid who was a student of Ferdinand Hochstetter, the leading authority in the f...

The ossicular chain has been known for 500 years and yet there are a small number of morphometrical studies. We reviewed the whole literature that is available online regarding the human ossicular chain from an anatomist perspective and correlated the data from all the papers that showed any relevance. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed a priori. A thorough description of all ossic...

Continuous attention has been developed on the anatomical variations of the axilla in anatomist and surgeon due to their clinical importance. The axillary region is an anatomical space between the lateral part of the chest wall and the medial aspect of the upper limb. During the routine dissection of embalmed cadavers, we found variant muscular slip originating from the lateral border of tendin...

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is considered the Father of Modern Anatomy, and an authentic representative of the Renaissance. His studies, founded on dissection of human bodies, differed from Galeno, who based his work on dissection of animals, constituted a notable scientific advance. Putting together science and art, Vesalius associated himself to artists of the Renaissance, and valued the ima...

The uses of anatomical models in medical teaching changed dramatically during the nineteenth century. The most celebrated Enlightenment ceroplastics, the royal collections directed by the natural philosopher Felice Fontana in Florence and copied for the militarymedical academy in Vienna, united science and art in three-dimensional encyclopaedias of the body. According to Fontana, one could lear...

We define a foundational model as an abstraction of a body of knowledge that explicitly declares the principles and concepts necessary for coherently and consistently modelling a knowledge domain. Principles for a foundational model of anatomy are defined and used to specify the components of such a model. These components include an anatomy ontology (Ao), an anatomical structural abstraction (...