Integration of innovative educational technologies in anatomy teaching: new normal in anatomy education

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has created a lot of turmoil in medical teaching, the magnitude of impact is many folds in the subject of anatomy, as it is practical based. A major challenge for anatomy teachers is to replicate the experience of practical exposures. These exposures range from cadaveric dissection to demonstration of bones, museum specimens, and histology slides, where they will have interactive communication with students, and thus help in the enhancement of communication and clinical skills among them. In recent days, anatomy teachers throughout the globe started using various advanced technology to make the teaching-learning session more interesting. In pre-pandemic era, usage of such advancements in information and communication technology was a 'choice'. But pandemic has changed the situation drastically, what was a 'choice' earlier is now an 'obligation.' Presently although infection rate is low, vaccination rate is high, most of the medical schools re-opened for usual offline teaching, still body donation is all time low making the situation 'back to square one'. Keeping such unprecedented situations in mind, we need to incorporate various innovative educational technologies in day-to-day teaching-learning methodologies.

Keywords: Dissection; Educational technics; Manikins; Pedagogy; Teaching method; Virtual reality.

Fig. 1

Overview of Anatomy Studio, a collaborative Mixed Reality (MR) tool for virtual dissection through augmented three-dimensional reconstruction (3DR) [41]. (Permitted to re-use under license no: 5191741337120 dated 18 Nov 2021© 2019 Elsevier)

Fig. 2

The robot, named Aldebaran NAO V5 robot to conduct the Mapping humanoid walking onto a reinforcement learning task [11]. (Permitted to re-use under license no: 5194110132450 dated 22 Nov 2021© 2019 Elsevier)

Fig. 3

High-fidelity simulation with sophisticated manikins in simulated patient environments, also known as a human patient simulator

Fig. 4

Figure: Graphic representation of virtual reality, augmented reality, and alternate reality, including optimal educational applications [17]. (Permitted under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License 4.0)