For the new Anatomy Learning Center at UCSF's Parnassus campus, school officials sought to integrate high-tech tools with the classic cadaveric dissection.
The result: Instead of paper manuals, each lab table has an iPad uploaded with the manual, interactive graphics and quizzes. Faculty use mobile cameras to beam images of a cadaver wirelessly to TV screens and the iPads throughout the room. And students can watch surgeries taking place somewhere else on campus.
"It's about making the lab extend beyond the walls," said Chandler Mayfield, director of technology-enhanced learning in the university's School of Medicine.
The university and designers consulted with students and faculty for months to find out what they wanted to see in the $7.5 million learning center, which opened in August and was paid for with public and private funding. In addition to the lab, it includes offices, a classroom with wireless video capabilities, and a memorial wall where students can commemorate those who donated their bodies for their education.
The university shut down the old anatomy lab in September 2010 because its ventilation system was so outdated that chemical levels got too high. For the past two years, while the new center was being designed and built, students and faculty had to make do sharing the School of Dentistry's lab.
The old lab was a relic of the 1950s. The tables were made mostly of wood and were too tall for many students. The lights provided uneven lighting for students dissecting cadavers. And the circulation problems left the smelly embalming chemicals hanging in the air.
"Your hair would reek, your clothes would reek," said anatomy Professor Kimberly Topp. "You would get into the elevator, and everyone knew where you had been."
The new 3,500-square-foot lab is in the same place as the old lab on the medical school's 13th floor. Wall-to-wall windows look out onto Golden Gate Park and into Marin. It feels light and spacious, despite the 30 exam tables with four students buzzing around each.
Six 72-inch TV screens line the wall opposite the windows, and whiteboards with handwritten lists of muscles, bones and ligaments cover much of the remaining wall space. The ceiling is dotted with wireless routers, retractable extension cords and surgical lights that students can maneuver over their cadavers.
Architect Malvin Whang of the firm Harley Ellis Devereaux said he tried to create a warm and inviting space where students would want to study and that also met the functional needs of an anatomy lab.
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UCSF anatomy center's high-tech upgrade
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