Anatomy students swap corpses for 3D-printed organs

A US team wants to help train doctors with 3D-printed body parts, rather than cadavers.

Typically a medical student would train on a cadaver before ever going near the human body with a scalpel. It's the only way to get hands-on experience, that doesn't involve potentially maiming a live human being. This relies on people instructing that their bodies be donated to science following their death, however, and as the need for more healthcare professionals grows in line with booming ageing populations, those donations have not always necessarily followed suit.

In the UK in June, The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) made a public appeal to highlight this very problem, exasperated by fund shortages which mean paying for the necessary licenses and protocols becomes a strain. In it, they said it was "alarming" that neither the Plymouth nor Exeter medical school had any cadaver training, and that many students were leaving university with very little understanding of the human anatomy. Professor of anatomy Vishy Mahadevan at RCS told The Independent: "Whereas anatomy was once rightly regarded as essential and of crucial importance to the study of medicine, the time allocated to its study in the present day is substantially and worryingly less than in the past. We are seeing an increasing number of qualified doctors in their early surgical training who do not feel confident in their clinical abilities, and they often attribute this to an inadequate understanding of anatomy.

"What is important is for all these students to go away with a fairly comprehensive understanding of three-dimensional anatomy, not just the anatomy they can pick up from colourful atlases and pictures."

Enter Australia's Monash University, which believes it has developed the toolkit to meet this dire need. We already have models, but Monash is 3D printing anatomically correct limbs, chests, abdomens, heads and necks that will fill the void where cadavers are lacking.

The 3D Printed Anatomy Series will be for sale (the team is looking for partners now), and could stand to be a game changer in terms of costs and access. The team is also suggesting it could be seen as an alternative for people who, for cultural or religious reasons, can't train on a cadaver

"Many medical schools report either a shortage of cadavers, or find their handling and storage too expensive as a result of strict regulations governing where cadavers can be dissected," said Monash director of the Centre for Human Anatomy Education, Paul McMenamin, "Without the ability to look inside the body and see the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and blood vessels, it's incredibly hard for students to understand human anatomy. We believe our version, which looks just like the real thing, will make a huge difference."

The toolkit is created by scanning real body parts with a CT or surface laser scanner. The many snapshots taken of layers of the body part is then translated into a plastic or plaster representation with accurate colourings, made to scale. They are cheaper than maintaing a cadaver, last far longer and best of all, as McMenamin points out, they don't smell like an embalmed corpse.

The toolkit is an interesting proposal, but it seems there is nothing to stop a medical centre -- which could well be attached to a university with its own 3D printer -- printing its own body parts. Therefore there would need to be some form of certification system to separate the body parts that have been printed by a professional team, accurately, and laypeople that might incorrectly represent the specimens. There are plenty of free CAD files for body parts on Thingiverse -- it's knowing how these were produced, that's important, so that only the most useful and highly accurate ones are replicated by medical professionals. For its part, Monash has had its proposal published in thejournal Anatomical Sciences Education, so it has that prestige behind its product.

Another issue, however, is that the Monash team's body parts are displayed post-dissection. Any trainee might be getting a good view of what to expect, but they cannot know what it is like to dissect the human body and thus how much pressure is needed to break through skin, tissue, muscle, tendons or more when eventually operating. On top of this, if a student trains on a cadaver, they will see how the parts interlink internally, and how much one body can vastly differ from the next. With the Monash toolkit, they might only come to know one set of distinct parts, as distinctly separate entities -- not an ideal compromise.

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Anatomy students swap corpses for 3D-printed organs