The doctors who will graduate from the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific-Northwest will have an edge over their peers when it comes to understanding anatomy as it relates to their patients.

Because of a partnership between the radiology department at Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital and the medical school, all donor-cadaver-patients are completely imaged before they are transferred to the anatomy lab.

This allows students a complete picture X-rays, MRIs, CT scans of the patients they are dissecting in class.

We teach anatomy in the most progressive way that a medical student could receive, said Brion Benninger, M.D., vice chair of the anatomy department for Western University of Health Sciences, COMP-Northwest.

Not every medical school has an anatomy lab, and those that do often use generic images, not ones directly from the donors being worked on, Benninger said.

This method of teaching anatomy is important because a family physician cannot dissect a patient to discover the illness, he said.

Instead, they use images.

Imagine if youre a student; youre assigned to table three, dissecting that particular body, Benninger explained. When you hit the chest, you say, Wow, look at that heart, its much bigger than I anticipated. These vessels dont look the way theyre supposed to classically be in the book.

Students may look at the imaging from that body and see firsthand what that heart looked like on an X-ray or other image.

That sort of imagery, you never forget it. Never, Benninger said.

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Learning anatomy, from the inside out