Ten years. It’s hard to believe how far Complete Anatomy has come - and how much has changed since those early days. Even now, after moving on to other projects, I still feel the same excitement about its future as I did when we wrote the first lines of code. The last decade has been a journey of passion, collaboration, and relentless curiosity - and I’m proud to have been part of it.
This month marks ten years since the launch of Complete Anatomy - a product that started as an ambitious next step and became the world’s most advanced 3D anatomy platform.
From the very beginning, Complete Anatomy was driven by visionaries who believed in redefining how anatomy could be taught and experienced. John Moore and Niall Johnson played a crucial role in setting that direction - building early relationships with Apple and recognizing the potential of their emerging ecosystem. Their clarity, ambition, and ability to connect technology with purpose gave the project the strong foundation it needed. None of what followed would have been possible without their leadership and persistence.
Complete Anatomy was built on the success of Essential Anatomy - and on our desire to go beyond it. Essential Anatomy showed that users wanted an interactive, 3D way to study the human body. Complete Anatomy aimed to turn that experience into a living, learning platform - not just a viewer, but a space for collaboration, teaching, and discovery.
Interestingly, the very first PoC of Complete Anatomy was built for the web using three.js. At that time, the idea of running complex 3D models in a browser was bold - but browsers and GPUs weren’t quite ready for what we needed. The performance and interactivity we envisioned were just out of reach.
That’s when Apple entered the story. With the iPad Pro arrival, a new opportunity appeared: a powerful, touch-based device perfectly suited for visual learning. We took what we had from our web PoC - the front-end and interaction concepts - and merged it with the Essential Anatomy rendering engine. A bridging layer allowed both to work together, an approach that was quite popular and experimental at the time. The result became the first public release of Complete Anatomy - designed specifically for iPad Pro and demoed at Apple event in September 2015.
That year is imprinted in my memory forever. Two exciting things happened - my son was born, and later that year, I had the chance to visit Apple’s campus in Cupertino for the first time. Three weeks that I spent there were both challenging and rewarding. Being far from family, while my newborn son and wife were at home - wasn’t easy. After two weeks, I told the team I couldn’t stay longer, as my wife needed my support.
That’s when my colleagues Andrii Bohdanovskii and Misha Opanasuk flew over - a great example of how our teamwork always carried us forward. I still spent countless hours perfecting the cut-tool algorithm for the demo part during that time. The collaboration with Apple didn’t end there - in fact, the whole experience deserves its own post. Someday I’ll write about it in more detail.
From those early releases onward, our focus was always on performance and quality. We invested countless hours researching how to push the maximum number of triangles to the GPU while keeping the experience responsive and beautiful. This relentless engineering drive was paired with the incredible talent of our 3D artists, who brought anatomical precision and artistic depth to every model - supported by the deep commitment of our medical writers team, ensuring accuracy down to the smallest structure.
Equally vital was the influence of our Design and Medical teams, especially Irene Walsh. Their vision for usability, educational flow, and learner experience helped shape Complete Anatomy into what it is today - intuitive, elegant, and deeply humane.
The success of Complete Anatomy has always been the intersection of five streams: user experience, customer support, 3D artistry, medical writing, and technology. It’s that balance - combining science, design, empathy, and engineering - that made Complete Anatomy not just a powerful tool, but a truly engaging experience for learners around the world.
In 2019, just before Elsevier acquired 3D4Medical, we began developing CARE 2.0 - the Complete Anatomy Rendering Engine. The mission was ambitious: design a rendering architecture that could power the product for another five to seven years without major rewrites. The project ran for two years, divided into three major phases, and pushed our technical capabilities further than ever.
CARE 2.0 became the foundation for the next leap - enabling more realistic rendering, smoother animations, and a unified technology base that could extend across multiple platforms.
Nine years after our first abandoned web MVP, Complete Anatomy finally arrived on the web - this time, for real. And unlike the first attempt, this release reused the same core technologies developed for native apps, built over the past five years on the pillars of success: the data model, the rendering engine, and much of the UI logic. For our engineering team, it was a huge milestone - the culmination of years of designing systems flexible enough to go even further.
Bringing Complete Anatomy to the web wasn’t just a technical win - it was the realization of the vision we had from day one: to make advanced 3D anatomy learning accessible anywhere, on any device.
Today, even though I’ve moved on to other projects, I’m still closely connected to the team through our work on ECA - the web platform that allows embedding Complete Anatomy’s 3D content across other digital experiences. It’s exciting to see our technology extend into new contexts, helping others teach, share, and innovate.
Complete Anatomy has always been more than a product - it’s a living ecosystem built by passionate people. I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together, and even more excited to see where the next decade takes it.
Here’s to everyone who shaped this journey - from the early pioneers like John and Niall, to every engineer, artist, product thinker, and educator who believed that technology could make learning anatomy fun and enjoyable.