AM teaching medical students

[Monterey Jack]

Hey folks,

 

I'm a medical student at Case Western and after suffering through a neuroanatomy course at the beginning of this school year a programmer classmate and I decided to change the way the course was taught. For those of you lucky enough to have avoided this subject throughout your lives, a med school neuroanatomy course focuses on the spinal cord and brain locations of various groups of nerves that are functionally related. One of the big challenges is learning the clinical consequences of damage to these groups and how those consequences can change depending on where in the brain/brainstem/spine the damage occurs.

 

Right now, the way the course is taught is through textbooks and grainy, black and white photos. Your shown a blurry picture of a section of brainstem and then you read that damage at this location causes ataxic gait or some other fancy medical jargon. There's rarely any kind of visual explanation of the symptoms, students are just expected to know what ptosis or nystagmus looks like.

 

What my friend and I cooked up was a virtual 3D patient that can demonstrate the symptoms a doctor might see. This movie clip is a screen capture from a demo version of our program that shows our patient, Larry the Lesion Guy, presenting with Wallenberg Syndrome, a stroke that affects the outside rear part of the medulla in your brainstem. What you'll see is two major symptoms for both the face and the body. Please, please forgive me for the "normal" walk cycle, it was done at 6:30 am, 90 minutes before we had to be at the conference to present.

 

As far as we can tell, there isn't anything else like this program out there so we're pretty excited. We presented it at an anatomy conference a few weeks ago and got such a positive response that we're looking at the possibility of marketing it to other med schools. We still have a lot of work to do on it though.

 

A huge thanks to Paul Daley who modeled, rigged and textured Larry in just a few days.

 

http://www.cheesewars.com/larry_demo3.mov

 

Thanks,

 

Gregg

[pixelmech]

Hey Gregg - that is really excellent work on what sounds like a short timeframe. I can tell you it's a good teaching aid, without sound or medical knowledge I understand what you are trying to get across. Certainly you might want to do some UI testing and refining but it's a great start.

 

Certainly a final product would be cleaner but you've done a great job. Keep us abreast of your progress!

[Zaryin]

That's a pretty good idea. I hope it works out.

[KenH]

Yeah great idea! This is an area I've always wanted to get into....modeling/animation wise.

[Gene]

I think the really great part of this is that it is scientific, but at the same time leaves a lot of artistic creativity up to the Modeler, Animator.

 

I am also really interested in what can be done with AM in this field.

 

Best of Luck

 

Eugene

[Monterey Jack]

Thanks for the comments guys.

 

Pixelmech: The screen capture was only about half of the interface, there is some more stuff like text and a diagram of the medulla that gives more info on the syndrome and its symptoms.

 

Gene: One of the main goals I had when animating Larry was to try and give him as much personality as possible without getting too goofy and losing credibility. As med students ourselves, we've spent way, way too much time being bored senseless by textbooks and other types of educational software that all seem to be written with the philosophy that anything educational must also be tedious and painful.

 

Gregg