Comparison of cadaver and 3D immersive virtual reality in anatomy education

Anatomy is considered the foundation of a body of knowledge that all students studying in the health field receive and that should be built in the health field. The usual educational system in anatomy teaching includes textbooks, presentations, three-dimensional models, cadaver bones, cadaver prosections and dissections. Technological developments in recent years have allowed the addition of many new approaches to these techniques. Notable new approaches include head-mounted headgear systems that enhance the understanding of anatomical structures through an immersive virtual reality experience. This study compared the effectiveness of anatomy teaching provided by this type of immersive virtual reality with the effectiveness of anatomy recording on a cadaver. Participants in the study were students who were in the first year of their 4-year physical therapy training, who were found to have the ability to use binocular vision in the Titmus test and who had no previous experience with virtual reality. As a result of the evaluations, 80 participants volunteered to participate in the study. Participants were randomized into two study groups based on gender, rotation variant of the Purdue Spatial Rotation Test, and Kolb Learning Style Inventory. After attending theoretical lectures in presentation format and examining three-dimensional models of the upper extremity region deemed appropriate for the study, participants in both groups were divided into two for the thirty-minute virtual reality and cadaver application. 74 of the initially randomized 80 people participated in the applications. It was found that the virtual reality group achieved a statistically higher number of correct answers than the cadaver group in the 38-question test measuring the participants' anatomy knowledge (p = 0.048). Based on this result, it was concluded that immersive virtual reality applications are more effective in teaching anatomy than teaching on cadavers.