Development of Online Anatomical Atlas for Biomedical Informatics

Biomedical and medical informatics belongs to rapidly growing area where informatics and medicine meet to improve quality of healthcare and human well-being as well. This fact can be observed in many software companies that have started to focus on the development of software solutions for healthcare institutions, for analysis and further processing of medical and biomedical data as well as for assistance in medical diagnosis and treatment. This trend calls for new generation of IT experts that are educated not only in software engineering but also in data analysis and in basics of medical and biomedical terminology, so, they are able to speak the same language as physicians and other staff of hospitals and biomedicine laboratories. Therefore, Latin terminology and basic knowledge of human anatomy and physiology have become a crucial point in their education. However, students of technically-oriented study programs usually do not like education based on self-study of many teaching materials and memorizing them. They prefer to learn by doing practical assignments, which force them to acquire new theoretical knowledge and increase their practical engineering skills. For this purpose, we have initiated the development of an online anatomical atlas for teaching human anatomy. The atlas development has been started by students of the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics of the University of Zilina. In this paper, we present its basic architecture together with its core features.