Gross Anatomy Lab Renovations Looking Good

In the process of becoming a doctor, anatomy class is one of the steps involved.

“If we taught you how to ride a bicycle the way we’ve traditionally taught anatomy, you’d have to learn every part of the bicycle before you actually got on it,” says Jonathan Wisco, PhD (’03), associate professor of anatomy & neurobiology.

Thanks to an anonymous, significant gift, a $1 million overhaul of the Gross Anatomy Lab began in 2020 and is nearly complete. According to Wisco, the anatomy lab upgrade reflects multiple pathways to learning and is in step with new curriculum changes implemented this year for the Class of 2026 that incorporate self-directed learning and early exposure to clinical concepts.

“We’re providing students the exposure to the 3D donor—plus the technology—before they dissect,” says Wisco. “The more that students know what they are looking for, the better dissectors they are.”

Located on the 10th floor, the lab features new windows that flood the area with sunlight, including the section where dozens of donor bodies lie in bright-blue body bags on portable dissection tables.

“The natural sunlight coming in puts your mind at ease,” says Anatomy Laboratory Director and Anatomical Gift Director Robert Bouchie. “It shouldn’t be macabre; it should be something that you’re embracing.”

As many as 45 donor bodies are used every year for between 309 and 370 students, with as many as 180 medical students and 130 dental students participating. The lab is noisy when in session, says Bouchie, but it’s the good sound of students learning how they can help future patients.

“I want there to always be this subliminal feeling of life,” he says.

The upgrades include improved communications for instructors with an enhanced sound system and monitors linked to iPads, as well as updated lighting, heating, air conditioning, and ventilation. New technology includes ultrasound units and an Anatomage virtual dissection table. Communications upgrades allow images from the Virtual

Human (VH) Dissector—displaying 3D and cross-sectional views of more than 2,000 anatomical structures—to be displayed on monitors across the lab.

Wisco encourages students to use both traditional teaching aids (such as anatomy books and photos) and new technologies to prepare for dissection on donor bodies and to work backward from dissection, through the technology to the textbooks, to better understand what they encounter.

Third-year medical student Jessica Landau-Taylor uses a new ultrasound machine on second-year medical student Nimish Saxena in the newly renovated Gross Anatomy Lab. Students use the ultrasound to see how organs and other bodily systems look and work in a living person.

Gross Anatomy Lab research assistant and second-year anatomy & neurobiology graduate student Tyler Capen demonstrates the new Virtual Human (VH) Dissector that displays 3D and cross-sectional views of more than 2,000 anatomical structures.

“That way, they are contextualizing more and more sophisticated information that they imprint in their minds,” he explains.

With new technologies that can duplicate dissection, third-year medical student Jessica Landau-Taylor was initially skeptical about the need for real donor bodies until she found the new technology in the lab worked well with dissection, improving the process by providing context and the opportunity for self-directed learning.

“There’s nothing quite like actually being able to see the structure—tissues, organs— in an actual human being, in color, with your eyes, the same way you see everything else,” says Landau-Taylor. “It’s also good to see it in a way that’s been formatted to help you learn.”

“[The Anatomage table] is a great way to visualize anatomy, especially anatomy that may be difficult to see on a cadaver,” says postgraduate teaching assistant Sydney Mosaheb, MS, who also is a research assistant in the BU CTE Center. The technology makes it easy for students to investigate on their own or double-check their work on the human donor.

“Trial and error, at least for me, is helpful for learning and medical students have to learn so many things that being able to just memorize it in a way that makes sense to them is very helpful,” says teaching assistant Paola Castro, MS, who also is a research technician in the Cellular Neurobiology Lab.

The new technologies also lend color and a realistic look to organs and other structures that can be relatively colorless and physically flattened in donor bodies due to the embalming process. The ultrasound, VH Dissector, and Anatomage also help students interpret scanned images from similar instruments like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) that students will see in their clinical rotations and as physicians.