From Pocket Anatomy:

Pocket Heart is a novel way to visualize how the human heart works, in 3D.  Pocket Heart affords students and health care professionals the ease of access to this learning and demonstration resource while at home, work, study, or on the go.

So, whether you’re a student needing to learn, understand and memorize all of the anatomical features and functions of the heart, or a health care professional looking for a novel way of communicating a diagnosis or procedure to a patient, colleague or trainee, Pocket Heart’s unique 3D interface can facilitate this.

It would do great for patient education, especially seeing the heart beat in real time.

See a demo of the app in action here!

Author

eMedia Interactive Ltd. info@eMedia.ie

Features

• Navigate your way through a pumping 3D heart model
• Toggle heart pumping on and off
• Shows the body cavity blurred out in the background, which gives you a sense of orientation in the body
• Click to immediately see cross section of pumping heart
• Detailed descriptions accompany each label on heart
• Quiz mode
• Shows blood flow through the heart while it’s pumping

Limitations

• Not the best model of a heart, but you have to sacrifice quality in order to have a smooth running program!
• Only provides basic information about the heart, so it might not be suitable for medical students or others looking for an in depth study tool

An interactive tool designed to help teach the muscles of facial expression.

From Artnatomy

ARTNATOMY/ARTNATOMIA is a Flash interactive english/spanish tool. It is intended to facilitate the teaching and learning of the anatomical and biomechanical foundation of facial expression morphology.

Author

Victoria Contreras Flores

mail@victoriacontreras.com

Features

• Two levels allow you to first understand the facial muscles and how they control the face, while the second level allows you to see which muscles are active in certain expressions such as anger, irony, rejection, pain, etc.
• Ability to control the transparency of the skull and muscle layers of the face
• Toggle between a line drawing of the face and a fully rendered sketch.  Level II also gives you examples of expressions in real photos of the face.

Limitations

• Some of the translations from Spanish to English make it difficult to follow descriptions at times
• Definitely not for beginners in anatomy
• Would be great if it also identified the bony landmarks on the skull to help follow the descriptions

From AnatomyLab

AnatomyLab is the ideal application for the student of human anatomy, the medical professional, or for that matter, anyone interested in the structure of their body.  While there are many products that allow you to study drawings of the human body, there are very few that allow you to follow the dissection process of an acual human body and explore the amazing structure of the human form with beautiful, clear photographic images.  AnatomyLab allows you to progress through numerous levels of dissection while labeling and studying the different anatomical structures.

Author

University of Utah

Christopher R. Johnson  crj@sci.utah.edu

Tom Fogal  tfogal@sci.utah.edu

Mark Nielsen  marknielsen@bioscience.utah.edu

Lee J. Siegel  leesiegel@ucomm.utah.edu

Features

• Rotate the cadaver and zoom in or out to more clearly see any structure
• Each label is accompanied by text describing its structure and function
• A search engine allows you to easily locate any structure on the cadaver
• A toggle button on the home screen allows you to toggle on or off a “Genital Blur” lest you be tempted to giggle at the genitalia while studying…

Limitations

• Not detailed enough to identify tiny structures, such as nerves and ligaments, which is the type of detail that medical students need to learn (UPDATE: they’re currently working on a version with higher resolution images to fix this problem)
• Needs more in depth muscle action description
• Overall this app needs some content improvement to make it a truly useful tool for medical students

From Netterimages.com

Netterimages.com is a collection of medical illustrations by world renowned medical illustrator, Frank H. Netter, MD, and physician-artists, John Craig and Carlos Machado.  Topics range from human anatomy to clinical disease states to new therapeutic technologies. Illustrations in this collection are offered for sale as rights-managed imagery.

Author

Elsevier

Karen Oswald
Digital Asset Manager
e-mail: k.oswald@elsevier.com

Features

• Hundreds and hundreds of the classic Netter medical illustrations to choose from
• Browse through mini-collections of predefined lightboxes such as, the Spine and the Wrist, that help you find related images on common health topics
• Ability to choose an image from a specific textbook featuring Netter images
• Images are categorized by specialty
• Each image is accompanied by a list of images in similar topics, a list of different versions of the image, and the textbook(s) that the image is found in—very thorough

Limitations

• Images are quite pricey depending on use, but then again, it is Netter