ANATOMY

School of Medicine: the ability to examine a patient without destroying vital organs.

With a touch of a button, the skull is whole again.

The touch-screen tables, which replace cadavers that would be found in a traditional anatomy lab, are just one example of the innovative curriculum the first class of 60 students will encounter when they set foot in the school on July 17. THE BACKBONE

UNLV won’t be the first school to use virtual technology.

But it’s the school’s commitment to teaching the subject that sets it apart, according to Dr. Ellen Cosgrove, vice dean for academic affairs and education.

“We’ve decided to make the virtual anatomy the backbone and the framework of our anatomy instruction,” she says.

When Dr. Jay Crutchfield arrived at A.T. Still University in Mesa, Arizona, he was given a directive: Get rid of cadavers.

For the past five years, his students have been using a combination of three virtual anatomy programs to learn the parts of the human body, but cadaver dissection is still an option for them.

“With each class, we start out with 75 students dissecting a cadaver, and two weeks later, we’re down to 10,” Crutchfield, who serves as the chair of anatomy, says. “Once the shock and awe wears off, and they find out how time-consuming it is to perform a dissection, they don’t want to do it.”

He sees the benefits of virtual anatomy when his students reach their clinical rotations.

“Three out of four times, they’re often better at looking at CT scans and identify- ing structures than the residents they’re rotating with,” Crutchfield says, adding that some in the medical community fear that students won’t truly learn anatomy by using only CT scans and MRIs.

“When’s the last time your family physician was in an operating room and needed to know where the renal artery is?” he says.

Haycocks, who learned human anatomy in a traditional lab, agrees that cadaver dissection is limited in its educational benefits.

“You spend hours cutting through tissues, trying to find this or that,” Haycocks says. “Sometimes it’s well preserved, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you accidentally destroy whatever it is you’re looking for, and sometimes you’re just lost. You never find out what’s going on. It’s a very lengthy and time-consuming process.”

Haycocks previously taught at a college where he oversaw a cadaver lab. He says that he loved working with the students and seeing their reactions as they cut open a human body.

“That’s enjoyable for me at least, but it’s really inefficient,” he says.

The technology can display images of the body from a variety of perspectives and angles, including 2-D cross-section and 3-D rotation.

reviewjournal.com/virtual_ anatomy

With a slight tap, Haycocks lit up the screen with millions of tiny blue channels, illustrating a patient’s veins.

And in terms of instruction, virtual anatomy is beneficial because everyone gets the same information. It’s also less time-consuming and costs much less than a traditional cadaver lab, which runs upward of $10 million.

“If you talk to most people who teach anatomy nowadays, they would agree, perhaps grudgingly, that in well under 100 years, nobody is going to do cadaver dissection anymore,” Haycocks says. COMBATING INERTIA

Haycocks cites several benefits from a curriculum standpoint but also points out a few flaws to the system.

“For me, the main disadvantage is that you don’t have that first patient experience with a real human body,” he says.

Crutchfield disagrees with the first-patient argument, which he has heard countless times in defense of cadaver dissection.

“Are you telling me that my first patient is a dead guy? Because I hope that’s not true,” he says. “My first patient should talk to me, tell me where he hurts.”

Dr. Richard Drake, director of anatomy for Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, has consulted with UNLV administrators about their new approach. He says it’s important for students to work with a cadaver during their first two years.

Cleveland Clinic’s program is currently the only one in the country that uses cadavers that are not embalmed. That may change in 2019, Drake says, because the school’s new medical building will not include space for a traditional cadaver lab. Meanwhile, he’s still determining how best to use virtual anatomy.

“A lot of education in general, and medical education in particular, there’s a lot of inertia,” Haycocks says. “Things have been done a certain way for the last 150 years. And by God, the faculty had to do it a certain way, so they’re going to make the students do it a certain way.”

Haycocks says a fourthyear elective is in the works that would give students the opportunity to learn to become an autopsy technician at a monthlong boot camp.

“If you want to practice cutting human tissue without any of the rules of surgery, it’s hard to beat someone who died the day before,” Haycocks says.

Cosgrove says it might take a student in a traditional lab an hour of dissection to view a particular nerve and what path it takes.

At UNLV, students will be able to go through several virtual anatomy stations that have specific learning objectives with problems for them to solve.

“At the end of the two hours, you emerge from that experience with a wealth of information,” she says. Contact Natalie Bruzda at nbruzda@ re9ieojournal.com or 702-477-3897. Folloo @NatalieBruzda on Toitter.