A Use Cases Driven Design of a Virtual Anatomy

Anatomy teaching forms a fundamental part in undergraduate medical and dental education. Gross anatomy teaching using post-mortem bodies at the same time causes extensive high infrastructural and personnel resources. Dissection rooms and related mortuary facilities are expensive to operate, hence technical capacities are limited by the logistics involved for providing the basis of high-quality teaching. Virtual tools offer a realistic and immersive learning experience, thereby supporting to better prepare students for their hands-on teaching experience, and hence allowing to enhance the dissection course in an effective way. Furthermore, students can translate their knowledge to other fields in medicine such as radiology or surgery. Even though virtual tools cannot replace hands-on-teaching, it was hypothesized that as a result of using virtual tools accompanying teaching, student learning experience and knowledge gain will be enhanced, thus providing a more effective approach towards teaching delivery. The starting point for the here given project was to evaluate emerging virtual technology with the potential to be deployed in anatomy teaching. We assessed three technical scenarios driven by suitable use cases for individual teaching processes, which will aim to enrich the classical way of anatomy teaching approach by taking advantage of virtual tools. Two scenarios are hybrid, one scenario is virtual asynchronous (but can also be used in a classroom lesson). All three scenarios can also be applied to other fields of science teaching, e.g. engineering teaching by simply replacing the content. In this paper we describe the seven-dimensional use case definition, the technical design of the scenarios and first pilot trials.