Of Mice and Men: Design of a Comparative Anatomy Information System

In previous work, we proposed an approach called the Structural Difference Method (SDM) to correlating the anatomy of Homo sapiens with selected species, using the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) as a framework and graph matching as a method, for determining similarities and differences between species. In this paper, we present the design of a comparative anatomy information system that utilizes the SDM and allows users to issue queries to determine the similarities and differences between two species. Our system will serve as a pilot project for cross-species anatomical information collection, storage, and retrieval. The underlying data structure of a mapping, and the syntax and semantics of the system's query language, are presented.