Visible Embryo Project

rdf:langString Visible Embryo Project

rdf:langString The Visible Embryo Project (VEP) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research project originally created in the early 1990s as a collaboration between the Developmental Anatomy Center at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Biomedical Visualization Laboratory (BVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "to develop software strategies for the development of distributed biostructural databases using cutting-edge technologies for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC), and to implement these tools in the creation of a large-scale digital archive of multidimensional data on normal and abnormal human development." This project related to BVL's other research in the areas of health informatics, educational multimedia, and biomedical imaging science. Over the following decades, the list of VEP collaborators grew to include over a dozen universities, national laboratories, and companies around the world. An early (1993) goal of the project was to enable what it called "Spatial Genomics," to create tools and systems for three-dimensional morphological mapping of gene expression, to correlate data from the Human Genome Project with the multidimensional location of genomic expression activity within the morphological context of organisms. This led to the invention in the late 1990s by VEP collaborators of the first system for Spatial transcriptomics. Other areas that VEP researchers pioneered include early web technologies, cloud computing, blockchain, and virtual assistant technology.