Using WebGL for Teaching Bone Identification

Newly developed interactive tutorials and applications which teach human anatomy are often set up as pay-to-play websites. Examples of these include the Visible Body app¹ and the 3D Organon Anatomy². Though these applications can be very educational, they may be costly, thus many students and members of the education community will not access these programs because of the upfront charges. These teaching programs are also frequently anatomically limited because they utilize idealized models, like KineMan³, instead of renderings or imaging data sets obtained from humans (clinical or from cadavers). This characteristic may make them useful study tools, but will not best prepare future doctors, nurses, and other health professionals for true, variable patient anatomies they will encounter in their various practices. Further, such students would likely gain more by studying 3D objects of real human anatomies instead of 2D images. We have designed a strategy to bring 3D human anatomies from real cadavers to the scientific and education communities completely open source (free of charge). Our interactive application is geared toward students of all ages (grade school to medical school) or by anyone interested in learning more about human bone anatomy.