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Credits and licences

Where everything comes from

SomaVista combines openly licensed anatomical models with original code and writing. Each component keeps its own licence.

3D anatomical models

Source
BodyParts3D, release 3.0, “polygon reduction rate 99%” OBJ set (BodyParts3D_3.0_obj_99.zip) with parts_list_e.txt — LSDB Archive download page (opens in a new tab)
Creator
The Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS), Research Organization of Information and Systems, Japan
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan (opens in a new tab), as stated in the release 3.0 README and in the header of every OBJ file. The archive's current licence page (updated 27 February 2025) states CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab) for the database; SomaVista follows the stricter share-alike terms of the release it uses, which also satisfies CC BY 4.0.
Required credit
“BodyParts3D, Copyright© The Database Center for Life Science licensed by CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan”
Changes made
  • Selected 330 of the 934 atomic meshes (bones, cartilages and selected organs); muscles, skin, hair, teeth, the cerebral cortex gyri and reproductive organs were not used.
  • Converted from millimetres to metres and from the source axes (z up, x towards the subject's left, −y anterior) to a Y-up frame by rotation only, so left and right are preserved; recentred so the feet rest at y = 0.
  • Removed degenerate and duplicate triangles; simplified meshes above a triangle budget (2,600 for bones, 1,600 for cartilages, 7,000 for organs; 16,000 for the heart wall and 9,000 for the cerebellum) by uniform vertex clustering. Smaller meshes are unchanged.
  • Discarded the source vertex normals (recomputed in the browser) and stored positions as 16-bit integers with a per-mesh offset and uniform scale (glTF KHR_mesh_quantization).
  • Repackaged as one binary glTF (.glb) file per system, with each structure as a named node using its BodyParts3D ID; the attribution is embedded in each file's asset.copyright field.
  • Removed the source's 'nsn' (not otherwise specified) suffix from five display names and capitalised the first letter of each name.
Licence of the modified models
The modified model files in models/ and the home-page image rendered from them are distributed under CC BY-SA 2.1 Japan. They are not covered by the code licence.
Reference
Mitsuhashi N, et al. BodyParts3D: 3D structure database for anatomical concepts. Nucleic Acids Res. 2009;37(Database issue):D782–5. (opens in a new tab)

Educational text

All descriptions, lessons and quiz explanations were written for SomaVista. Structure names are the English names supplied with BodyParts3D, which follow the Foundational Model of Anatomy. Each note cites a section of OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology 2e where the facts can be checked.

OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology 2e (J. Gordon Betts et al., OpenStax, 2022) is cited as further reading. Its text is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and is not reproduced here; SomaVista's explanations are written independently. The text has not been reviewed by a medical professional.

Software and fonts

Independence

SomaVista is an independent educational project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by BioDigital, Inc. No BodyParts3D, BioDigital or other third-party branding, page text, screenshots or code are used apart from the licensed models and libraries listed above.

Privacy

SomaVista has no accounts, analytics, cookies or tracking, and makes no requests to other websites. If you choose to save lesson and quiz progress, it stays in your browser's local storage and can be erased from the Learn page.