Carolina Nanez raised a stylus in her right hand and moved it through the air. An image of a human heart popped out of the computer screen before her, hovering and rotating in the air.
The heart was rendered three-dimensional by a pair of glasses, and it moved according to the motions she made with the stylus.
Last week, Nanez, a sophmore at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was among nearly 200 premedical and predental students who interacted with virtual reality technology during a weeklong conference held over spring break. The enrichment program, supplemented with lectures on anatomy, sought to introduce students who plan to pursue careers in health professions to learn more tangible information about the inner workings of the human body.
Nanez, who is studying biology and psychology, said she appreciated the hands-on aspect of the session and how it gave a taste of what medical school would be like.
“It’s better than just reading it because you get to see why certain things connect,” said Nanez, who is interested in cardiology and gastroenterology. “There’s so many words that you’re trying to learn, but when you actually see it, you understand why certain words are called the way they are and why they connect the way they do.”
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Dr. Hooman Mir, a 2006 UTSA graduate who is now an assistant professor at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif., helped organize the conference with his undergraduate mentor Eddie Hernandez, an assistant professor of biology at UTSA.
The technology, called zSpace, allowed the students to examine the organs up close and remove external layers. It also displays information about diseases and conditions that affect the area of the body being examined.
For example, when Nanez and her classmates were interacting with virtual lungs, a module along the side of the screen defined how a pulmonary embolism can suddenly block an artery in the lung.
“When they see it in 3D, when they see it in virtual reality, they’re able to then look at the entirety of the structure,” Hernandez said. “They’re able to pull it out, they’re able to spin it around, they’re able to put it upside down. They’re able to hide some structures to be able to locate the internal structures of the organ.”
Mir said he wanted to bring the training program to his alma mater so aspiring doctors and dentists could gain a better spacial understanding of the body’s anatomy. Such technology was not available when he was attending podiatric medical school a few years ago, he said.
Instead, textbooks were the main resource, and they had obvious limitations when it came to visualizing some areas of the body, he added.
“The textbook doesn’t show these 3D spatial anatomy relationships between the structures,” Mir said. “The new generation of future medical and dental students are in very good hands because, by having these new technologies being incorporated into their current medical and dental and health professional curriculum, they get to actually have that visual understanding and that spatial understanding of the anatomical structures.”
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Mir said the platform can also serve as a primer to students who may be expected in their careers to interpret CT or MRI scans, which are delivered in a 3D format.
The VR platform has been available to other UTSA students for about a year, Hernandez said, primarily to those studying majors like kinesiology, pre-physical therapy and pre-nursing. The conference was an opportunity to expand its availability to other students in biology and medical humanities majors, he added.
Lauren Caruba covers health care and medicine in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | email@example.com | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba