Beyond Vesalius: an interactive program for teaching sectional anatomy

Due to the widespread use of modern imaging techniques, sectional anatomy has become an essential element in the study of gross anatomy. At the same time, gross anatomy courses in many medical schools have faced increasing time constraints within the medical curriculum. Since time for traditional instruction in sectional and radiological anatomy was not available in our course, we decided to develop a program which would facilitate independent instruction of this material. In addition we wished to provide the students with tools for self testing in all areas of gross anatomy, using test questions written by our faculty. Early in the development process the Visible Human Dataset became available from the National Library of Medicine. The VHP Dataset provided an excellent source of high quality raw images for the this project. Selected VHP sectional and CT images from each body region (head and neck, thorax, abdomen, pelvis, upper extremity and lower extremity) were downloaded from the VHP database.These images were processed for color correction, size and placed on a uniform background using standard photo-imaging software (Adobe Photoshop). Processed images (16 21 sections per region) were assembled into an instructional program using the SuperCard authoring system on a Macintosh platform. Programs for each body region can be accessed from the graphical menu of a front-end program (Fig. 1) or can be used independently.