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Virtual-autopsy table debuts at UCF med school

Virtual cadaver introduces students to imaging, diseases, but not replacement for real cadavers

Anatomy professor Andrew Payer may never get a real cadaver with a rare cerebrovascular disorder to show his students, but now he has a virtual cadaver displayed on a table-sized touch-screen surface to help do the job.

On a recent afternoon, Payer, who runs the anatomy lab at the UCF College of Medicine, stood by his new virtual-autopsy table and tapped a few options on the screen to begin removing layers of flesh and bone from the life-size digital cadaver, revealing what Moyamoya disease, which means "puff of smoke" in Japanese, looks like in a patient.

Made by the California-based company Anatomage, one of the few companies that make such systems, the table costs $70,000 or more and is mainly used as an educational tool.

It is yet another sign that technology is becoming an integral part of learning and practicing medicine.

Unlike a real body, the virtual cadaver can be taken apart and put back together. Students can also see what different diseases look like by scrolling through an extensive index of options.

The system also helps introduce students early on to viewing and interpreting medical imaging.

"It helps them better prepare for being doctors," Payer said.

Students can load the CT scans of their cadavers onto Anatomage and explore their patients' bodies by adding and peeling back layers, isolating systems, rotating the body, and making cuts and exploring different planes.

And unlike the anatomy apps available for phones and tablets, the virtual-autopsy table allows students to explore together and learn as a team, not to mention that the images are at a much higher resolution.

"What this table doesn't do is that it doesn't introduce students to death and dying and their first dead person," Payer said. It also doesn't provide the experience of exploring the body to find the cause of death, he added.

"The two complement each other. I would never throw the cadaver out, and now that I've got this, try to get it away from me. It's great," he said.

For now, the anatomy class is over, the metal tables that cradled donated cadavers for 17 weeks lie clean and empty, and the first-year students have moved on. The next crop of first-year medical students arriving this fall will be among the first to learn anatomy with this system.

The virtual cadaver isn't self-sustaining. A team of systems engineers, including Joshua Simpson and Michael Pugh, tends to the high-tech body: a cadaver they admit they much prefer to the real cadavers they have to see and smell every once in a while when they have to fix a computer or device during the anatomy class. or 407-420-5158

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