© Heart Lab

Graduate research conducted by Danielle Robinson

First year medical students are equipped with a number of tools to guide them through the complex and intimidating field of gross anatomy. Danielle Robinson focused her research at UIC on creating an interactive web-based laboratory aid to help assist health care professional students to better understand cardiac anatomy. Her research aimed to answer the question “Could an interactive laboratory guide that combines multiple teaching methods facilitate the learning objectives of cardiac anatomy for the first-year health professional student”?

Experience Heart Anatomy.

© Heart Lab is a web-based interactive dissection aid for first year medical students. It’s equipped with readiness assurance tests, an interactable 3D model of surface and internal cardiac structures, and individual and team-based learning objectives. Lesson prompts are modeled after teaching methodologies currently used in medical schools today to better prepare students for their future professions. Team-based learning, problem-based learning and computer-based learning are incorporated in the website to reinforce learning goals.

In order to create a useful website, Danielle surveyed twenty-five first year health professional students at UIC on teaching styles they’ve been exposed to. Based on those results she created a wire-frame, lesson prompts, and a list of learning goals.

Highly realistic and detailed 3D digital cardiac models make for a better tool in the academic setting, however, models need to be low-poly when put into an interactive program or game engine. It is for this reason that the heart is modeled, painted and retopologized in Pixologic Zbrush before being imported into Unity. The base of both surface and internal anatomy was achieved with the use of photogrammetry, on which Danielle sculpted and painted all of the necessary structures.