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© Medical Daily
You've most likely seen X-rays of the human body to get a view of what our interior looks like, or illustrations of organs in text books - but you probably haven't seen what the entire body looks like in cross-section.

The GIF below offers a new view on how we see the human body in three dimensions. Using images from the Visible Human Project, it's strange and rather disturbing, making the human body look more like chopped meat than how we see it as a whole.

See GIF animation here. (This GIF was created using 1,878 photographs from the Visible Human Project)

In 1993, this body was scanned by an MRI and computed tomography equipment from top to bottom, all for the Visible Human Project. Funded by the NIH, the Visible Human Project aimed to create "complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies" back in the 1980s and 90s. It hoped to "produce a system of knowledge structures" to help understand the body visually.

Using a procedure called cryosection, the scientists took slides of the body to create a full picture. "The cadaver was encased in blue gelatin and frozen to -160 degrees Fahrenheit (-71 degrees Celsius," the video above states. "A custom-designed cryogenic macrotome was used to remove 1 millimeter sections of the rock hard block, revealing slice by slice the beauty and detail within. After each pass, high-resolution color digital photographs were taken of the remaining block."

In other words, the body was frozen then sliced into extremely thin pieces - 1mm thick - which were then photographed. During this process, 1,878 photos were taken then placed together to show the cross-section of the entire body in rapid succession.

But to view the body in a different angle, one Reddit user, who goes by the username "thealphamike," decided to take those images and transform them to see the body from the outside:

See changed GIF animation here

He even goes so far as to explain how he created the GIF using Photoshop and After Effects in the Reddit discussion thread.

Some background about the project: