For medical students, there really is no better way to understand the human anatomy than to see it in three dimensions.
But with medical schools often struggling with a shortage of cadavers, researchers in Winnipeg have found an innovative way to use state-of-the-art technology to create "cyber bodies" to practise on.
Researchers have just opened a new lab at the University of Manitoba, called the Laboratory for Surgical Modeling, Simulation and Robotics. The aim of the lab is to design new medical simulation technologies to develop surgery techniques.
With cadavers in short supply all around the world it's expected the technology developed at the lab will give medical students more opportunities to dissect and learn about surgery.
In the lab, skeletons can be created in a 3D "printer." The machine that can layer plaster and dust to create artificial bone and skulls, or reproductions of certain portions of our anatomy, such as an ear canal, with the main artery vein, clearly marked in red and blue.
Bertram Unger is the lab's director and also an associate professor of critical care medicine at the university. He says in the lab, students will be able practise surgeries that replicate closely what they'll experience in the operating theatre.
"We can give them a physical structure. It's very much like a real bone with colour coded interior and air spaces and let them drill that. According to the surgeons, it's just like drilling the real thing," he says.
Eventually, the lab intends to simulate soft tissue operations using synthetic tissue and blood.
Associate lab director Dr. Jordan Hochman says the lab is the result of work from physicians as well as computer science and robotics experts.
"This is really the collaborative work between engineers, physicians, anatomists. So we can take new technology and actually apply it in a learning environment, as well as the operating theatre," he says.
By allowing more realistic practice, medical students will be able to make mistakes without consequence. The ultimate aim of the lab is to help students and surgeons perfect procedures before ever putting scalpel to skin so they can enter the workforce with more experience and more confidence.
It's expected the technologies developed in this lab will also better prepare surgeons so they can reduce surgery times and blood loss. An independent study in the United Kingdom is now looking at how effective the work in the lab is in affecting operating room outcomes.
"I'm hoping what we are going to find when we do a large scale study is we decrease incidents of operative misadventure and ultimately, complications," says Hochman.
With a report from CTV News' Jill Macyshon
