Medical learning gets a makeover

A Montreal interactive multimedia project helps
lighten med students' burden with easy-to-understand illustrations

By Marcello Palmieri

Lectures can be a little abstract for new med students, especially when you're talking about the inner workings of the human body. Thankfully, help is at hand. The Molson Medical Informatics Project (MMIP), part of McGill University's Faculty of Medicine, has developed new hi-tech visual tools to help med students grasp complex concepts more readily and prepare them for the real world. Its mandate is to create, maintain and evolve interactive teaching material for undergraduates, graduates, CME and patient education.

MMIP is a collaborative effort that brings artists, professors, researchers and students together in an effort to greatly enhance the learning process. "It's really a labour of love," says Dr David Fleiszer, the director of the project. He hopes to help today's medical community avoid the frustration he and his colleagues once endured as med students. They had to share a large number of slides among themselves, which were not always accurate, making it time-consuming and impractical.

Begun in 1997 with support from the Molson Foundation, MMIP quickly gained momentum and went online in 2001. "The potential is enormous and could change the way we teach and learn," enthuses project administrator Nancy Posel. By using the latest web-based technologies to create an interactive environment, med students can get an in-depth understanding of a specific concept. For example, a student studying nerve conduction can go online and view animated illustrations of muscle and nerve disease or see a layered representation of the pertinent systems. If a student wishes to see where a specific system, such as the respiratory system, appears in the human body, it's just a click away. She can also view more than one system simultaneously or integrate them all to get a detailed graphic representation of the human body.

MMIP goes beyond sophisticated images and animations. It makes the learning process enjoyable for students and helps professors communicate complex concepts that are otherwise difficult to explain. "It's great to have the information online so students can see it before coming to the surgery room," explains Dr Fleiszer. He also uses the technology when talking to patients about an illness or treatment so they can better understand their conditions and possible cures. However, getting these hi-tech images and animations from the drawing board to the web is no easy task. It takes a dedicated team of 15 individuals, from clinical illustrators to professors and researchers. The process begins with a thorough assessment of what's needed for a particular lecture. For instance, a professor who wishes to show the processes involved in DNA repair provides such things as drawings, photos and other materials to the medical illustrator. Jennifer Day, the clinical liaison between professor and illustrator, ensures that the information exchanged between the two is accurate and clear. Depending on the complexity of the image or animation, the process can take from a few days to a few weeks. "No project is the same and an illustration may go back and forth two or three times between myself and the doctor," says Sherwin Tjia, one of the five clinical illustrators working on the project.

LOOKING AHEAD
The team is also working with three other medical schools to create a virtual hospital that should be up and running by the end of March 2004. Med students will be able to look up computer-generated patient profiles online. They can ask a series of questions and even perform tests on these "virtual" patients. Feedback is provided by the virtual patients, and based on this, and their knowledge and experience, students make a diagnosis. Their results are then compared to those of the professor. This makes it very illuminating for students since they get to see how their professor assessed the patient as well.

MMIP has also done a handful of lectures for McGill Mini-Med, a program that offers medical lectures to the general public. Dr Fleiszer would like to see this interactive teaching method extended to the 16 Canadian medical schools across Canada. As he puts it, "instead of doing 16 animations poorly, we'll do it once properly." Even places outside Canada, such as Senegal and South America, to name a few, have expressed great interest in wanting to establish liaisons with the project.

The technology in action: before and after renderings of arterioles. Please visit: http://curriculum.mmi.mcgill.ca/