The Centre for Digital Science and Technology has started the project of building a demonstrator of the Digital Science Platform to meet the needs resulting from the intensification of distance learning in universities. In the face of the new pandemic working conditions of students, it has become urgent to prepare educational materials of adequate quality that are accessible to all.
The study programmes for many fields of study (medical, biological) include human anatomy. Exercises in this area require work on prepared preparations, which are not always available to teaching centres. This state of affairs was additionally overlapped by the extreme conditions of remote learning during the pandemic.
Therefore, the concept of preparation of appropriate quality and universal access to educational materials developed in three-dimensional (3D) models, so that they would reflect 1:1 preparations previously available only in lecture halls, was born.
The presented project includes osteological preparations that help students to master the structure of the human skeleton. The development of these preparations is related to the fact that, in the present state, we are dealing with an insufficient number of these preparations. The short duration of classes during which students have access to it and the fragility of them make students often examine bone structures that they have never seen before.
Thanks to the use of perfectly reproduced bones, teaching anatomy can be standardized, not only in the setting of classroom teaching but also online. The Centre for Digital Science and Technology and the Institute of Biological Sciences of the UKSW have high competences and experience in the implementation of projects in the area of digital technologies, 3D scanning, 3D printing, virtual reality, visualization and visual analytics.
It is possible to download full models of 3D bone structures and their visualization through the use of VisNow software. Annotations of anatomical structures are available in Polish and Latin in files with the pac extension. Models and software are available to logged in users. To load a model, use the Wavefront OBJ reader module. Annotation of anatomical structures can be loaded via the PAC Reader module. Both modules are available from the irregular data readers directory. VisNow provides a rich set of modules for loading, filtering, mapping, saving, segmentation, simulation and processing of one-, two- and three-dimensional data.