Digital Fish Library
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The Digital Fish Library (DFL) is a University of California at San Diego (UCSD) project funded by the Biological Infrastructure Initiative (DBI) of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The DFL creates 2D and 3D visualizations of the internal and external anatomy of fish obtained with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods and makes these publicly available over the web.
The information core for the Digital Fish Library is generated using high-resolution MRI scanners housed at the Center for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CfMRI) multi-user facility at UCSD. These instruments use magnetic fields to take 3D images of animal tissues, allowing researchers to non-invasively see inside them and quantitatively describe their 3D anatomy. Fish specimens are obtained from the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) and imaged by staff from UCSD's Center for Scientific Computation in Imaging (CSCI).
As of August 2009, the Digital Fish Library contains almost 300 species covering all 5 Classes of fish, 54 out of 60 Orders, and close to 200 of the 521 described fish Families.
References
- Nelson, Joseph S.(2006): 'Fishes of the World'. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0471250317