McNulty downloads the Visible Human images through the Loyola University Medical Education Network and projects them onto a screen during lectures. Students view the images individually in the computer-aided learning lab and at home using their personal Internet accounts.
"Cross-sectional anatomy is increasingly important for practicing physicians to know well, particularly with expanded use of imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT)," said McNulty. "With the Visible Human Project, Loyola medical students can easily correlate, point-for-point, between the actual sections and the corresponding CT and MRI taken at that level. Before the Visible Human, we could never do such a direct correlation.
"Obviously, the better we train our students to understand the anatomical relationships seen in MRIs and CTs, the better they will be able to diagnose and treat their future patients.