Dissecting on the Internet

The art and science of the scalpel is learned through long hours of study and hands-on dissection. Starting with the lowly frog, students learn the basics of anatomy by practising on the real thing. But the Internet may change that. It now offers a “virtual” way to slice and dice everything from your favourite amphibian to the human body.

One of the first sites developed was The Interactive Frog Dissection (teach.virginia.edu/go/frog/). Launched 7 years ago, it is aimed at high school level students and offers photos, illustrations and short videos of actual frog dissections. There are also some interactive sessions that ask the student to choose the right incision points.

Staying with frogs, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created The Virtual Frog Dissection Kit (www-itg.lbl.gov/frog). Students can interactively dissect a digital frog named Fluffy, create movies and play the Virtual Frog Builder Game. It challenges users to reconstruct a frog from the nerves up — a twist on the normal dissection process.

But frogs are only one of the virtual creatures available for bloodless dissection. Students can also tackle the wonders of a cow's eye (www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/cow_eye/index.html) or delve into the marvels of a sheep's brain at the University of Scranton (academic .uofs.edu/depart ment/psych /sheep/). The Berkeley High School offers whole-cat dissection (www .bhs .berkeley.k12.ca.us /de part ments/Scien ce /anatomy /cat /index .html), while over at the Virtual Pig Dissection site (mail.fkchs.sad27 .k12.me .us /fkchs/vpig/) students can cut into an electronic hog.

Of course, the ultimate training ground for medical students is the human body, and the Internet serves up a wealth of virtual cadavers. The Virtual Autopsy at Leicester University (www .le .ac.uk /pathology/teach/va/) is aimed at the pre-clinical medical student. Pupils have 12 autopsies to perform, and are asked to determine the cause of death in each case.

At the high end of these online offerings is the Visible Human Project at the National Library of Medicine (www .nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/). Developers here have been building a complete digital database of human anatomy since 1989. The result is a virtual male and female data set built from actual CT, MRI and cryosection scans. Access to the entire database requires a licence, but some online samples are available.

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