When Anders Persson teaches anatomy, it’s often in a virtual-reality theater rather than an autopsy room. Donning 3-D goggles, his medical students view images projected onto a screen – “bodies hanging in air, full size, which you see in stereo,” he says – and can virtually pull back the skin to examine the organs. No saws or scalpels required.

Persson, a physician and member of the Rotary Club of Linköping-Västanstång, Sweden, is a pioneer in using 3-D imaging techniques to see inside the human body. For his work, he was honored in October with the Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific photography, presented annually by the Karolinska Institutet in honor of the Swedish photographer.

Although not a photographer himself, Persson started working with color-coded 3-D medical images 20 years ago – one of the first in the world to do so. “It was quite early, almost too early,” he says. “It was really time-consuming to do 3-D at that time.”

These days, software developed by the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization at Linköping University, where Persson is the director, takes data from MRI and CT scans and uses it to create a 3-D image of the body. The image can then be manipulated – the skin can be turned transparent, for example, to reveal the internal organs, and tissue types can be shown in different colors. “It’s like you’re painting with oil,” he says. “You can color-code the chemistry.”

Forensic pathologists have used the technique to perform virtual autopsies on homicide victims before working with the actual bodies. It’s been applied to 350 murder cases so far, Persson says, and was featured on the television crime show CSI . In cultures that forbid autopsies for religious reasons, the technology provides a way to see inside the body without violating taboos.

The virtual autopsy is just one application of the “synthetic MRI” developed by the Linköping University center. Also used on the living, it is more sensitive for heart and brain scans and much faster than current technology, and it will help doctors better diagnose patients and measure the progress of their treatment, Persson says.