Other schools watching UNI's purchase of synthetic cadavers

Starting this summer, undergraduate students at the University of Northern Iowa no longer will have to make do with dissecting cats to understand how bones, muscles, tissues, vessels and organs work together in the human body.

With a recent purchase of four synthetic cadavers — called SynDavers — UNI has become the first public university in Iowa to feature such developing technology as part of its undergraduate anatomy and physiology courses. The $150,000 cost of the SynDavers was funded by a $150,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust.

The SynDavers, manufactured by a Florida company of the same name, are made from materials that mimic the mechanical, thermal and chemical properties of live tissue. The technology is advertised as a means of replacing live animals, cadavers and human patients in medical device studies, clinical training and surgical simulation.

"I'm a nurse, and I've done surgery," said Mary McDade, an instructor of biology at UNI. "They feel more like living tissue than cadaver tissue."

Some of the more expensive models, McDade said, can pump blood and even simulate breathing. Officials in the UNI Biology Department, she said, were interested in a more basic model that would allow students to view anatomy on a more human-size scale.

McDade said former UNI biology students — who are now enrolled in professional health care programs — have said that more hands-on dissection experience, preferably with human cadavers, would have better prepared them them for their current studies in medicine, dentistry and physical therapy.

"With the cats, we could see how some of the muscles worked," said Derek Klein, a 2014 UNI graduate who is now a first-year graduate physical therapy student at the University of Iowa. "There are some similarities to humans, but there are more differences."

When taking his first anatomy course with a human cadaver at UI last fall, Klein said he noted a very different preparation level among the students from schools that offered more direct undergraduate experience dissecting the human form.

"We all caught up eventually, but there definitely was a difference," he said.

Anatomy instructors at other schools in the state had mixed reactions to the new technology.

"Just being able to see things on a human scale would be a benefit," said Darren S. Hoffmann, a lecturer of anatomy and cell biology at UI. "For undergraduates learning anatomy for the first time, being able to get their hands in and feel the three-dimensional relationship between the organs would be great."

UI does offer some undergraduate courses that include opportunities to visit the university's cadaver lab, said Hoffman, who also serves as vice chairman for UI's anatomy educational programs. The majority of UI anatomy courses — especially the large, lecture-hall courses — make use of virtual cadavers or recorded images from actual dissections.

Because UI's cadaver lab already is in use for graduate and professional programs, Hoffmann said, the few undergraduate courses that use the lab — including athletic training, radiation sciences and speech pathology and audiology — can do so at almost no additional cost to the university. And the students taking other anatomy courses as a required prerequisite, he said, typically don't require any lab experience.

"I don't know if that's an explicit need for us," Hoffmann said about UNI's purchase of the four synthetic cadavers. "But we'll be watching UNI. And if it proves to be a positive experience, it would be an investment we'd be excited about."

Barbara Krumhardt, a senior lecturer in the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology at Iowa State University, said allowing students to see "the diversity within a species" is one of the advantages to having multiple specimens for students to dissect.

The anatomy classes at ISU, like those previously at UNI, include the dissection of cats along with the other models for demonstrating the interactions within the human body. Most of the students enrolled in the courses, Krumhardt said, are in kinesiology or on other preprofessional health care tracks.

"Not every specimen is exactly like the others," she said. "It allows students to understand the diversity within the species of cats — and understand that diversity is at work in humans. Sometimes surprising things are found."

Krumhardt said she was unfamiliar with the SynDavers and that there are no plans to adopt anything similar for ISU's curriculum.

McDade said each SynDaver features hundreds of replaceable muscles, bones, organs and vessels. Eventually, she said, UNI will order parts for SynDavers that simulate pathologies — like an aortic aneurysm — allowing students to compare body parts that are normal in one SynDaver and abnormal in another.

"So they won't be 100 percent the same," McDade said.

Reach Jeff Charis-Carlson at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com. Contact him at @jeffcharis