Kings Synthetic Anatomy course development blog

Wonderful to devise and lead this session with Andrew and have Celia and Les on the team - learnt so much - had to set aside my anxiety about failure, students being bored or lost - and leave space for things to float a bit, for different things to happen. Fascinating to see the different styles of the groups emerge - the serious, the whimsical, the analytical, the jokers.  And loved watching Celia, Les and Andrew dive in to the different conversations and poke / provoke / cheer / cajole - brilliant.   We gave them scraps of clothing and measuring tools and asked them to look and think and make up a 3-minute story to present to their peers - who scored them on clarity, originality and story telling. The lessons from previous sessions seemed to have touched them somehow - more exploratory observation including touch, more confident use of pens and pencils, using their sketcbooks and working at scale.  Our outline lesson plan below and some images here too -  intro

the steep learning curve that is 3D printing is going well. I managed to print a brain with the two colour printer where the foundation struts are a different colour. I continue to be fascinated by the question what does science look like? so at the moment the imagery within the program is more interesting that the actual objects, although there is an abstract magic around making real the virtual which I am sure I will never fail to be amazed by.  In the drawing workshop the  level of serious fun and energy in the room (for 2 hours) was awesome.  The students progressed from 'this is a laugh', which it was, to taking the whole thing very seriously as they became focused and realised that drawing requires practice and adoption of a way of thinking to develop skills but that it can be a way to access looking and seeing. All this under the watchful eye of Celia who drove the session with a focused calmness. The drawing techniques and rules that were engaged in by the students w

I can't sleep on Thursday nights because I'm so excited about this module! Firstly, we managed to get our dual extruder printer working and Les was one of the first to run a print - mini brain - very beautiful. Les admiring his creation Our students learnt about the various uses of 3D printing at Guy's & St. Thomas' hospitals and then we had a brainstorm session to come up with the next breakthrough use of this technology in healthcare. Ideas ranged from 3D printing emergency supplies in space to printing out DNA one nucleotide at a time. 3D printing whole cadavers for dissection I taught the students about advanced features in ITKSnap for segmentation and nearly everyone decided to segment and print my femur / tibia. Working hard at finishing a knee joint Gorgeous sketchbook decoration - well done Devi! The afternoon was spent improving drawing techniques and having a lot of fun in the process.

Les taught our students how to use their sketchbooks with a sense of freedom - I could not have taken part because I would not have been able to cut-up my sketchbook! Les will have to take it easier on me. Our students produced an excellent series of 3D aorta prints. It was very hard for me to give out just one prize so we ended up with 6 prizes (and me out of pocket for a lot more than I had anticipated). Our fourth 3D printer arrived and it is a special one that can print 2 filaments. The printer got both Yohan and Shuangyi excited (something that I have seen before) and also somewhat challenged (now that I don't see too often).

During the Week 2 session the students learnt how to segment a high-contrast dataset and to print the resulting model at mini scale. We were using anonymised real patient data from Guy's hospital taken from MRI scans of children with congenital heart disease and coarctation of the aorta. The resulting 3D models were beautiful. We also learnt about creating objects using the FreeCAD software.

virtual heart surgery a first for me - working through new software is a learning curve and navigating through the body digitally is exciting but actual knowledge of anatomy is useful so that one doesn't get lost. The room we are working in is full of plastic models that are beyond odd.