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3D models in healthcare education - bone fractures

26 August 2013

We are now testing the use of 3D models to educate healthcare professionals in relation to the diagnosis, biomechanics, and treatment of bone fractures. Starting with wrist fracture models created in Maya since they are so common, we decided to focus on 3D models for the following reasons:

  1. Detail: Although the use of radiographs and other imaging modalities are certainly essential in training healthcare professionals to diagnose them, 3D models can show details that might not be possible with a regular clinical image.
  2. Rare cases: Some fracture types are just not common enough to be easy to find at imaging repositories. In contrast, it takes a few minutes to create a highly quality fracture model that can be sliced, diced and rendered in any way the instructor might want, including giving the model an aspect that looks like an radiograph.
  3. Biomechanics: Here I don't mean the fracture mechanism, which is usually what an orthopedic surgeon will think about when the word biomechanics comes up. Although mechanism could easily be reproduced in a dynamic model, an arguably more important aspect is how muscles, ligaments, gravity and other mechanical factors contribute to make fracture fragments displace in one way or another. The idea here is that students will learn why the fracture behaves the way it does, with obvious implications for how it should be treated.
  4. Treatment: Although treatment is not only about biomechanics, biomechanics does play an important role in defining how a certain fracture type should be treated. The idea for treatment then is to build dynamic models that will show how a given device or immobilization method interacts with the fracture biomechanics, making the treatment process more rational rather than an act of memorization.

At this point we are focusing only on static images, but dynamic ones should be coming up soon, along with evidence-based information. One of my surprises when going over musculoskeletal models available in the most common 3D repositories is how poor they are. They will frequently lack very important bone details, have details that absolutely do not exist, the relationship among the bones is just plain wrong, among many other things. If the situation with skeletons is overall poor, it gets much worse when it comes to models combining bones, ligaments, cartilage, muscles and other anatomical structures. Let's then not even talk about dynamic models. In sum, a ton of work moving forward.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.