Outlook for future anatomy teaching tools

The last time I was wandering around the old school district of the medical school, I was passing through an idle specimen room, and I saw the teachers who had been in the Fort Mallin for decades through a glass window, and I was a little confused. A few decades ago, medical students surrounded these yellow specimens with a fragrance in their noses. And now? My nephew's medical student already walked into the body with his VR helmet.——It's not a metaphor, it's really "walking" in, drifting down the femoral artery to the bottom of the foot, and the vascular branches along the road spread in the dark like luminous tunnels.

From "I can see" to "I can get in."

The dilemma of traditional anatomy has never been a lack of information, but a lack of dimensions. A beautiful picture is just a print that flattens three-dimensional life. Now the hybrid reality technology is breaking this ceiling. Last year the Stanford School of Medicine piloted a system in which students put their heads on and the air surfaced with a translucent body, and the finger was cut off from the skin and muscle layer until the bone was exposed. And the best thing is, these models are real time. Response——You squeeze the heart, it shrinks; you cut off a nerve and the corresponding area becomes ash.

But the tech houses may think even further. Someone's making tactile feedback gloves, so you can feel the real physical difference when you touch the virtual liver, and the team's experimenting with the complex organic odour of "smelling."——It's not the fun, it's the surgeon who really needs to be trained in the smell to judge the state of the tissue.

Where did the data come from? That's a problem.

Behind these fancy tools is an embarrassing bottleneck: high-quality human data is extremely scarce. Commercial anatomical models that you can buy often come from a small number of donors and are highly similar in size, age and history. What about real clinical? Fat distribution of obese patients, vascular disease of diabetics, and extremely well-developed muscles of athletes.——These variations are the real challenges on the operating table.

The good news is, AI is changing the logic of data production. Now there's a lab that's using an anti-network synthetic autopsy. Data: Enter thousands of real CTs to allow algorithms to learn statistical patterns of human structure and then generate a mass of labeled virtual cases. These figures will never be exhausted, allowing for the arbitrary setting of age, sex, pathological state or even the simulation of rare congenital malformations. Of course, the controversy comes with it.——When medical students are heavily trained in synthetic data, do they lose their judgment when faced with the real human body? No conclusion yet.

The bottom line that won't disappear.

After all, the core contradictions of anatomy remain unchanged: We try to use technology to approach life, but life itself can never be completely replicated. I've heard a detail about a top-level hospital with a multi-million-dollar robot for surgery, but the first class starts every year, and students are still to be silenced by their teachers. That sense of ritual is not depravity, but a reminder that every digital model you're about to operate, every piece of synthetic material, ultimately serves the real people.——People who bleed, suffer, dream of home in anesthesia.

What's the future anatomy class like? It may be a hybrid space where holograms coexist with physical samples and it may be a dynamic simulation platform that simulates the blood pressure from emergencies. But no matter how clear the screen is, there's a moment when students suddenly realize that the pixels and the code point to a living person who breathes, fears, holds your hand after the surgery and says thank you.