Thanks to virtual reality, it may soon be unnecessary to use human cadavers to teach anatomy to medical students.
VR helps prevent the need for bodies #shorts
Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine is working to reduce the use of human cadavers in its anatomy curriculum. Instead, the school is partnering with Microsoft to use HoloLens virtual reality technology and is sharing the technology with other medical schools around the country.
“Unlike in the cadaver lab, where the colors and textures of the preserved body can make it difficult to distinguish, say, a nerve from a blood vessel, or to see a lymph node, HoloAnatomy gives students a crystal-clear 3D map of these anatomical structures and their relationships to one another,” Mark Griswold, a professor at the CWRU School of Medicine, told Lifewire in an email interview. “This provides a great foundation upon which first- and second-year medical students can build on other critical concepts.”
Programmers and 3D artists worked with the school’s anatomy faculty to develop the HoloAnatomy Software Suite, which uses advanced mixed-reality technology to display the human body in three dimensions through the Microsoft HoloLens headset. The university claims that medical students learned anatomical content twice as fast as they did dissecting cadavers.
