The Northern Netherlands Cooperation (SNN) has awarded a subsidy of 799,000 euros to the project 'The Virtual Dissection Room'. Enatom, UMCG, Amsterdam UMC, and MemoryLab are collaborating to enhance current anatomy education with the use of new digital capabilities.

In the dissection room, medical residents study the ins and outs of the human body. "However, there is limited time for this within medical education," says Janniko Georgiadis, Head of Anatomy at UMCG. And the gap between anatomy textbooks for home study and real anatomical specimens in the dissection room is significant. "That's why our department, together with Enatom, developed a web application that allows students to view anatomy in 3D. Because this was done with thousands of photos of each specimen, the models are lifelike and highly detailed."

Further development of the virtual dissection room

With the subsidy from SNN, Enatom, UMCG, Amsterdam UMC, and Memory Lab can further develop the virtual dissection room. "We believe it's important for every biomedical student and healthcare professional to have access to our virtual dissection room to enrich and test their knowledge, regardless of location, time, or device," says Lusanne Tehupuring, CEO of Enatom. "This project gives a tremendous boost to our current application."

With Enatom's application, students and healthcare professionals can study a large part of the human body in 3D thanks to images of hundreds of specimens. "But not everything has been captured yet," says Tehupuring. "Thanks to this subsidy, we can explore the best way to do this. Take, for example, the brain. It's preserved differently than body parts for which we already have images in our application. The question is how we can best capture that. Amsterdam UMC specializes in this, and together with them, we are exploring how to do it."

Collaboration with MemoryLab

With the help of MemoryLab, an expert in adaptive learning, research is being conducted on how users can best learn in 3D and how to assess that. Tehupuring explains, "Think, for example, about how we can know if the student in our application is pointing out the correct part, how quickly they do it, and whether they actually remember it." Enatom is also developing its own mobile scanning studio to capture specimens more quickly and efficiently.

Source text and image: Enatom. Image: students in the UMCG dissection room using Enatom.