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Medicine is changing and the training of medical students must also improve to enable us to better understand the human body and fight disease more effectively.
that's why Sue Potter, a resident of Denver, decided to be the first living human to offer her body to medicine to make a " digital cadaver".
Mother of two, Sue is died in 2015at the age of 87, pneumonia. His body was posthumously frozen and quickly separated into 27,000 thin pieces carefully preserved for three years. The pieces have finally been digitized and will serve as a basis of study for students.
The story of Sue Potter
Sue, his real name Susan Christina Witschel, was born and raised in Nazi Germany with her grandparents, her parents having abandoned her to move to New York. Something she never forgave them, she told National Geographic.
After the Second World War, she herself left Germany for New York, where she married in 1956 her husband Harry Potter (!), an accountant, with whom she had two daughters. When Harry retired, the family moved to Colorado.
After that we do not know much about what happened in the family. All we know is that in 2000, at the age of 73, Sue lived alone with a fragile health. She had melanoma, diabetes, and had bad cancer. And all this had earned him various surgeries. In 2000, when she was discovered, she thought he had only a year to live. It was that same year that she stumbled upon an article that talked about Human Simulation Project of the'University of Colorado and its innovative project, " Visible Human ».
The choice to offer your body to science
By the time Sue discovered it, the Visible Human project, founded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US, had already embalmed and froze the bodies of a man (Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 1993 death row in 1993) and a woman (aged 59, died of heart disease in Maryland in 1994). Both bodies were then cut up and digitized for the purpose of being used in the training of medical students.
Sue decided, during her lifetime, to be the third: making her the first living person to propose his body as a "digital cadaver".
When Sue made the request to Dr. Vic Spitzer, the project director Visible Human, he first rejected his proposal, considering the case of the old lady too complicated. In fact, Dr. Spitzer was working on rather "well-preserved" bodies, while Sue had undergone various surgeries, had been affected by bad cancer, and had diabetes. She finally manages to convince him, but on the condition that she records the rest of her life.
The recording of the rest of Sue Potter's life was entrusted to National Geographic. But while they all thought that Sue had only one year left to live, to the surprise of all, the old lady lived for another 15 years. What makes his case, one of the longest documented stories of a patient involved in a research.
The digitization of Sue Potter's body
When Sue died, her body was separated into 27,000 small pieces, which is much more than the 2,000 pieces of the first patient in 1993. And while the first time the process took four months to complete, Sue's case took only 60 days, thanks to new technologies. After this step, the scientists then proceeded to the long and laborious process of defining the different structures (organs, tissues, vessels) on each part of Sue's digitized body. A job that took them about three years.
With the process now complete, Sue Potter's 15-year narrative will be published in January 2019 from National Geographic, entitled The Future Of Medicine ". For the future, Dr. Spitzer hopes that Sue's case is just the beginning: "The goal is that one day you can have enough body [numériques] in your library to be able to choose the most logical body to simulate a given pathology or procedure. ", did he declare.
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