Tridimensional Vectorial Modeling of the Human Body From Anatomical Slices: A New VR Learning Tool for Students

Background

Cadaver dissection has long been an essential step in human anatomy, being the gold standard for education (Sugand 2010). Anatomy is one of the core courses in medical education, a morphological discipline that requires a large amount of human material. Increasing student enrollments and decreasing numbers of cadavers have made it more difficult for medical students to access and manipulate cadavers within their less available laboratory training time (Older 2004). Improvement and deepening of knowledge by using anatomical specimens and practical anatomy can obtain the best teaching results (Chapman, 2013; McMenamin, 2018).

Digital anatomy is a technology that can computerize the anatomical structures in order to virtually observe, measure, and manipulate them (Zhang 2005). Its main goal is to provide a greater understanding of the human body’s internal organs, helping student’s ability to recall spatial relationships between structures, both in two-dimensions (2D) and three-dimensions (3D). Virtual reality techniques enable the user to combine digital input and real-world objects. Thus, it is a true revolution in anatomy using virtual anatomy education systems (Preim 2018).

Otherwise, there is an increased demand from radiology and endoscopy imaging and other invasive and non-invasive medical techniques. Currently, the use of radiological imaging (CT and MRI) is an integral part of teaching. The use of virtual reality (VR) technology using a virtual anatomy teaching system could therefore provide real, reusable teaching resources to the learning process (Yammine, 2015; Wilson, 2018). It could also be used for surgical education and simulation.

Sectioned images of the visible human projects are of considerable interest due to their high resolution to build 3D atlases of the human body based on vectorial modeling. It is also the best way to provide the reconstruction of the nerves, not visible when using angio-CT reconstructions.

The authors explain here their process of 3D modeling of the body from the slices of Korean Visible human (KVH) data. The structures are precisely segmented manually using 2D images, then reconstructed and displayed as 3D images. The volume models can thus display an arbitrary section of the model and provide a virtual dissection function. A new networked teaching system using this technique with a 3D atlas of the body can be read remotely, displayed locally, and manipulated interactively.

This manual segmentation of anatomical slices process has been achieved with the Winsurf® software (Moody 1997) producing an interactive 3D vectorial model of the whole body.