SCALPELS DOWN

Waikato's planned new medical school aims to shut the door on cadaver dissection in favour of digital alternatives.

- BY SYLVIA GILES

VIEWERS OF TV MEDICAL DRAMA The Pitt (which screens here on Neon) may have noticed the ubiquity of the portable Butterfly ultrasound. In one episode, medical students rushed around a mass multi-trauma event diagnosing, for example, intracranial bleeds after ultrasounding a patient's eye. The depiction is really one of a zeitgeist moment in medical practice: point-of-care, or bedside, ultrasound. Use of the handheld Butterfly device, producing images that can be displayed on a clinician's phone, is fast becoming an extension of the traditional physical examination, especially in emergency departments. And these days, doctors of all stripes commonly apply their anatomy knowledge via modern imaging such as CT scans, MRI and ultrasound every hour of every day.

“Most of the organs I see in my clinical practice are scans,” says cardiothoracic surgeon, honorary professor and interim dean of medicine at the University of Waikato, David McCormack. Though he spends his operating life with his highly trained fingers in people’s hearts, lungs, and aortas, the medical educator is clear about the digital implications for learning anatomy.

“For most of humanity, the closest approximation of living anatomy was dead anatomy. That is not true any more both in terms of how we learn, but also how we practise.”