LAS VEGAS (AP) - The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, always planned to add more bodies to its medical school. Under its latest funding plan, some will be dead.
A $125 million outline for UNLV’s School of Medicine building includes a cadaver lab - a departure from designs to continue having students study human bodies and dissections on large touch screens.
Dr. Jeffrey Fahl, a UNLV pediatrics professor, said hands-on experience could complement learning in the virtual lab.
“I don’t look at it as one or the other,” he said. “They would supplement each other.”
Virtual labs have been presented as a modern and cost-efficient alternative to traditional cadaver dissections, a hallmark of the medical profession for centuries.
On one screen, students can inspect organs, bones and muscles from multiple angles and redo their work - something that’s impossible the old-school way.
Some universities and researchers say the virtual tool lacks the realism necessary to train future doctors, while hands-on experience may be more important to surgical residents than to primary care or psychiatry students.
For others, a cadaver lab is a point of pride for students and alumni.
Nevada System of Higher Education Regent Mark Doubrava, an ophthalmologist, said a cadaver lab would make UNLV competitive with schools throughout the country.
At the University of Nevada, Reno, the $36 million Pennington Health Sciences Building opened in 2011 with a cadaver lab.
“Students have a decision to make, and they may have in their calculation that they want that cadaver lab experience,” Doubrava said.
He said UNLV’s virtual anatomy lab allowed the school to open in 2014 earlier than expected.
Fahl was tasked in 2016 with developing a first-of-its-kind anatomy curriculum relying exclusively on virtual training.
A cloud-based medical imaging library lets students re-create human structures from CT scans and call up a list of steps or additional views on another side of the screen.
With a swipe, students can remove skin, tissue and bone and rotate the virtual cadaver - a digitized series of images of executed Texas murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan provided by the Visible Human Project. Jernigan died by lethal injection in August 1993 at age 39.
“This is a very powerful way of doing things,” Fahl said, adding that UNLV students studying virtual anatomy consistently score higher on National Board of Examiners tests than students who have taken traditional anatomy.
Kyle W. Petersen, a professor-emeritus at Emory University who assisted with the development of UNLV’s virtual lab, said there’s nothing a cadaver lab can offer that the virtual lab can’t.
“It’s a misconception that these labs train students to use a scalpel. The way you’d use a scalpel is very different in surgery. The tissues of a cadaver are very different,” Petersen said. “It might be 20 surgeries before someone feels comfortable with what they’re doing.”
UNLV is not the only southern Nevada school pursuing a cadaver lab.
Roseman University of Health Sciences, which enrolled its first class in January 2001, is in the midst of a $150 million fundraising campaign for its College of Medicine. It intends to include an anatomy lab at a northeast Las Vegas campus that will combine cadaver study with virtual instruction.
“The training of compassionate healers begins in the anatomy lab,” said Mark Penn, founding dean of the medical school.
Touro University Nevada has had a cadaver lab since its Henderson campus opened in 2004.
“There is no substitute, at this point, for an actual human cadaver,” said Emmett Findlay, chair of the Touro basic sciences program.
He said that through touching, feeling and seeing, medical students gain a deeper understanding of human anatomy.
“It’s like riding a bike: You can read books about bicycles and bicycle maintenance, but until you try and sit on a bike, you won’t know if you get it,” Findlay said.
Fahl said the cost of building a cadaver lab at the Shadowlane Biotech Research Center - the temporary site of the UNLV School of Medicine - would have been about $10 million, with a yearly upkeep of $2 million.
The university was instead able to purchase eight virtual imaging screens for about $70,000 each, Fahl said.
If a cadaver lab becomes reality at the UNLV School of Medicine, Fahl said it would complement learning in the virtual lab.
“I don’t look at it as one or the other,” he said. “They would supplement each other.”
Doubrava said his own cadaver training would have been more efficient with a digital component.
“We could spend hours … dissecting, but if you have digital imaging to refer to at the table, it would have enhanced that experience,” he said. “You ask, ’What structure is that?’ and the answer is right there.”
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Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
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