Welcome to the MRI Movie Atlas home page. This website is intended to serve as a source of anatomic information for radiologists and other physicians. The files are presented as dynamic movie files in Quicktime format. The images are maximal in quality, having only minimal photoJPEG compression applied. This also means that the files are rather large (1-3 megabytes) and therefore probably best used with broadband access. The Quicktime plug-in is required to view the images and is available free from the Apple website at www.apple.com/quicktime.
The movies will open in a window and autoplay. You can stop the movies and also navigate forwards and backwards using the slider or buttons on the player, or by using the right/left arrow keys on the keyboard. To get the best performance, use a recent computer and set your monitor to at least 800 by 600 resolution and 24-bit color. If you want to open several different movies, open new movies in new separate windows, since any closed movies will need to be re-downloaded! I have had better luck running Quicktime movies reliably with Netscape than with Internet Explorer, both on my Mac and on my PC, but you can obviously choose yourself.
The idea for the whole project actually began with my frustration as a musculoskeletal radiologist, trying to figure out what muscles were involved adjacent to a bone sarcoma. I could not find a reasonable cross-sectional atlas of any extremity parts between the joints and decided I would make my own. I also thought I would also use really good MR images, since some of the best atlases were several years old and clearly could use the better SNR available with modern equipment. I thought that that a user-controlled movie would make cross-sectional imaging atlases easier to use as well. Finally, a digital atlas can be distributed easily and cheaply so you don't have to lug around a heavy, expensive, worn-out atlas that is lost half the time anyway. As for this last point, if there is enough interest, and I have enough time, a CD-ROM version with the whole enchilada would be the ultimate goal. Meanwhile, I hope you find these files useful. More files should be forthcoming as I have time to create them. Happy viewing!
All images and movies are copyright J. H. Edmund Lee, M.D. Reproduction of any material without prior consent is prohibited. No guarantee is provided as to the accuracy of the information contained in the movies.
J. H. Edmund Lee, M.D.
frankdcat@sbcglobal.net