The question is put to two girls in their science class at Bethel High School: If you could dissect an actual human cadaver right here on the table, would you want to?
“Yeah,” said junior Alicia Rivera, with a tone that wonders why anyone would bother to ask.
“Absolutely,” said sophomore Chloe Howell, almost leaping in the air with enthusiasm.
Howell plans to go into obstetrics. Rivera wants to be a forensic pathologist. Their time with real live dead bodies in the classroom lies ahead.
For now, they’ve got the Anatomage table.
It’s one of the newest additions to Bethel and to the Governor’s Health Sciences Academy there — a computerized table that allows students to examine every layer of the human body from skin to skeleton. “Virtual dissection,” they call it, and while it has become increasingly common at the college level, Hampton is one of the few cities in Virginia that has one in a public school.
The machine cost $78,000. “Paid for with grant money,” said Dorothy Garrity, principal for the academy. That includes the extra $10,000 for the advanced model that can also be turned vertical (so that it can be placed at the front of the classroom for all students to see).
“You can only use a cadaver once,” Howell said. “If you slice the stomach open the wrong way, you can’t press a button to restart.”
The Anatomage table — which is available to academy students as well as Bethel’s regular science classes — arrived in May and, now that the staff is trained on it, is being used for the first time in Tracy Cornell’s science classroom. It’s touch-screen surface is easily operated with the use of a soft-tipped pen, which can be used not only to make incisions, but also to turn the body for front, back and side views.
Turning one skeletal view to the face-down position, Cornell explains a common mnemonic device for medical students: If you remember that you eat breakfast at 7, lunch at 12 and dinner at 5, you will always know that there are seven vertebrae in the cervical section of the spine, 12 in the thoracic section and five in the lumbar.
The table is loaded with 3-D images of four cadavers — two male, two female, two Caucasian and two Asian, so that students can learn how to deduce gender and ethnicity by the difference in how certain bones are shaped. Each of the four bodies was meticulously photographed so that students can cut it open at any spot on the body, at any depth, to study the musculature, the inner organs and the skeletal structure.
The bodies come with the actual case histories of the subjects so a student can study the virtual organs to determine a cause of death and then check for the correct answer. For veterinary students, there are also the bodies of several types of animal scanned into the table.
“It’s so much more hands-on than just reading about it in a book or even seeing it on a computer,” Cornell said. “These are real cadavers that they get to work on, and that’s a great resource to have in the classroom.”
The health sciences academy, the largest in the Hampton school system, will have more than 500 students next year. In the past, the students have taken field trips to the cadaver lab at Eastern Virginia Medical School and a Sentara anatomy lab, but the Anatomage table is an everyday resource.
“I never would have imagined having something like this in my classroom,” said Cornell, in her 13th year teaching. “Maybe a basic touch-screen, but not with all the different layers. Even if I did dream this up, I would have never thought it could be available to me at the high school level.”
The Anatomage table sits just a few yards away from another addition to the Health Sciences Academy — the SimRX machine, which simulates the process of entering patient records into computer databases. Students can go through the process of admitting a patient and supervising medications, tests and symptoms.
Kathleen May, a teacher with a nursing background, has her students create a fictional patient and take him or her through the entire treatment process. (On Friday, the patient was a Mr. Jimmy Neutron, who had been shot in the kneecap.)
“If a student wants to become a medical assistant,” Garrity said, “this way they’ll know how to use the equipment without having to spend so much time learning it. They’ll have a big head start.”
These new technologies reflect what Hampton City Schools wants to accomplish with its specialized academies format.
“I feel very privileged and glad to get to experience this in high school,” Rivera said. “My parents tell me they never got anything like this when they were in school, so I know what a great piece of equipment it is.”
Mike Holtzclaw / 757-928-6479 / mholtzclaw@dailypress.com
