The research team’s starting point was a practical one. As medical curricula increasingly incorporate new technologies, educators need evidence about whether those technologies actually help students learn, and whether students themselves would embrace them. To that end, the Drexel group built a database of virtual 3D scanned prosections—cadaveric specimens that have been professionally dissected for teaching purposes and then captured as digital three-dimensional models—for students to use while studying gross anatomy. Prosections are a precious and finite resource: each one requires hours of skilled dissection, and the supply of donor bodies is limited. A high-fidelity digital replica, by contrast, can be viewed by unlimited numbers of students, at any time, from any location, without degrading.

To test whether the digital versions could stand in for the real thing, the researchers recruited twenty-nine incoming first-year medical students before they had begun formal anatomy coursework. The participants were divided into two groups: fifteen students would be taught using physical prosections of the external heart, and fourteen would learn from virtual 3D scans of the same prosections. The study was deliberately structured in four stages, allowing the team to measure learning gains with unusual rigor for an educational technology trial.

First came a pre-test, administered to all participants, that used both physical prosections and images of the virtual 3D scans to probe what the students already knew about external heart anatomy. Then each group received a teaching session using its assigned modality—the physical group handling and studying the actual dissected hearts, the virtual group working with the 3D scanned models. Immediately afterward, all students took a post-test identical to the pre-test, again assessed on both physical specimens and digital images. Finally, every participant completed a survey about their experience and attitudes toward the technology.

The exam results delivered the study’s headline finding: both groups improved dramatically, and neither format held an advantage. Students taught with physical prosections raised their scores to an average of 42.6 percent, with a standard deviation of 17.9, while students taught with the virtual 3D scans reached an average of 44.3 percent, with a standard deviation of 24.0. The difference between the groups was not statistically significant, but the improvement within each group was, with post-test scores rising significantly above pre-test baselines regardless of whether students had prior anatomy experience. In other words, the digital models taught anatomy just as effectively as the cadaveric specimens they replicated—a result that carries real weight given how often virtual resources are dismissed as inferior substitutes.

Perhaps more striking was what students believed about the technology after using it. Those who had learned with the virtual 3D scans were significantly more likely to agree with the statement that they would be able to sufficiently learn anatomy using 3D scans, rating their agreement at 4.1 on a Likert-type scale compared with 3.0 among students taught with physical prosections. First-hand experience with the digital resource, it seems, converted skeptics into believers. Confidence in one’s own learning is not the same as learning itself, but the alignment of subjective confidence with objective performance in the virtual group is exactly the pattern educators hope to see when introducing a new tool.

Yet the survey also revealed a firm boundary to students’ enthusiasm. Regardless of which group they had been assigned to, participants disagreed with the idea that they would have a similar laboratory experience if they learned from 3D scans instead of dissection—the physical group averaging 2.1 and the virtual group 2.5 on the agreement scale. The dissection laboratory, it appears, offers something the students regard as irreplaceable, whether that is the tactile engagement with real tissue, the ritual of working with a donor body, or the collaborative culture of the anatomy lab itself. This finding echoes a long tradition in medical education scholarship that frames dissection not merely as a means of learning structures but as a formative professional experience in its own right.

At the same time, students saw a clear and valuable role for the digital resource alongside traditional teaching. Both groups agreed that they would use the virtual 3D scans to prepare for the dissection laboratory and for practical and written examinations, with ratings of 4.5 in the physical group and 4.9 in the virtual group. Rather than viewing the technology as a replacement, the students positioned it as a complement—a way to preview structures before entering the lab, review them afterward, and study at times when the laboratory is closed and the prosections are locked away. This blended model aligns with a broader trend in anatomy education, where meta-analyses of three-dimensional visualization technologies have generally found modest but real learning benefits when such tools are integrated with, rather than substituted for, conventional instruction.

The context for this study matters. The COVID-19 pandemic forced anatomy courses around the world online almost overnight, accelerating adoption of virtual and augmented reality resources and prompting a wave of research into their effectiveness. Surveys of anatomy education before and during the pandemic documented a rapid, sometimes chaotic shift toward digital delivery, and questions about the appropriate balance between cadaveric and digital learning have remained contentious ever since. Studies of computer-generated three-dimensional models, immersive virtual reality, photogrammetry-based training tools, and web-based interactive visualization have produced a mixed but increasingly encouraging picture, with the Drexel results adding a rare head-to-head comparison using authentic scanned prosections rather than idealized computer renderings.

The study’s authors are careful about what their data can and cannot show. With twenty-nine participants, the sample is small, and the standard deviations—especially the wide spread of 24.0 points in the virtual group—indicate considerable variability in how much individual students gained from each format. The subject matter, the external heart, represents one region of gross anatomy, and results might differ for more spatially complex regions such as the temporal bone or the brachial plexus. The students were also tested immediately after teaching, leaving open questions about long-term retention. Still, the core conclusion is difficult to dismiss: on a practical examination, virtual 3D scans of prosections performed on par with the physical specimens from which they were made.

For medical schools weighing expensive investments in digital anatomy infrastructure, the message is nuanced but actionable. Virtual 3D prosection databases can serve as legitimate learning tools, capable of producing measurable gains in anatomical knowledge equivalent to those achieved with physical specimens, and students who use them come away confident in their value. But the same students who endorse the technology also insist that it should not replace the dissection laboratory itself. The future of anatomy education, if the learners have their say, is not digital versus cadaveric but digital and cadaveric—scanned hearts on the screen before the exam, real ones on the table in the lab, and a generation of physicians trained with the best of both.

Subject of Research: Comparing the effectiveness of virtual 3D scans and physical cadaveric prosections for teaching external heart anatomy to medical students

Article Title: A Practical Examination and Feedback Survey Evaluating Learners Taught Using Physical Prosections vs. 3D Models of Prosections of the External Heart

Article References: Waldman, S. A., Sejdiu, Z., O’Hara, S. M., Shumsky, J. S., & Howe, C. A. (2025). A Practical Examination and Feedback Survey Evaluating Learners Taught Using Physical Prosections vs. 3D Models of Prosections of the External Heart. Frontiers of Digital Education, 2(3), Article 27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44366-025-0064-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44366-025-0064-9

Keywords: anatomy education, medical education, 3D scanning, prosections, gross anatomy, virtual dissection, heart anatomy, cadaveric specimens, student performance, digital learning, Drexel University, practical examination

The research team, led by Songyuan Yao, Rui Liu and Xiju He, took advantage of a natural experiment already unfolding at their institution. Forty first-year medical students, none of whom had prior cadaver-dissection experience, were taught anatomy in two intact classes of twenty students each. One class received pure virtual reality instruction; the other followed a traditional cadaver-based curriculum. Rather than designing a bespoke laboratory study, the researchers integrated data from three routine educational-assessment modules already collected at the medical school, then designated the comparative analysis framework after the fact. That design choice matters for interpretation: because students were assigned by class rather than individually randomized, the study is exploratory and noncausal, a caveat the authors state plainly.

What makes the study unusual is its insistence on measuring performance beyond simple recognition. Most evaluations of virtual reality anatomy teaching stop at multiple-choice quizzes taken minutes after the lesson, a format that flatters digital tools because standardized images on a screen resemble the standardized renderings inside a headset. The Chinese team instead tracked three harder outcomes: the peak force students applied during a standardized task on cadaveric tissue, their diagnostic accuracy on noncanonical computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging cases that deviated from textbook appearances, and the trajectory of their knowledge scores from thirty minutes to four weeks after instruction.

The haptic gap was the most striking. When students who had learned in virtual reality first touched real cadaveric tissue, they pressed with an average peak force of 8.74 newtons, compared with 4.52 newtons among cadaver-trained classmates. That mean difference of 4.22 newtons carried a 95 percent confidence interval of 2.92 to 5.52 and an effect size of Cohen’s d equal to 2.09, an extraordinarily large value by any educational or psychological standard. In practical terms, students who had never felt the resistance of skin, fascia and muscle handled real tissue nearly twice as forcefully as those who had, suggesting that the absence of realistic touch feedback in the virtual environment left a measurable imprint on motor behavior the moment students encountered the physical world.

Not every comparison favored the cadaver group, however. On a standardized model recognition task, the two groups were statistically indistinguishable: the virtual reality condition averaged 0.91 against 0.87 for the cadaver group, a difference that fell short of significance at p equal to 0.082. Immediate knowledge scores were likewise compatible with no difference between the teaching formats. In other words, for the kind of clean, canonical recognition questions that dominate conventional anatomy exams, a headset did the job just as well as a dissection table. The virtual classroom appears to be a perfectly adequate place to learn the map of the body; the trouble emerges when students must navigate terrain the map never depicted.

That trouble surfaced in two places. First, on noncanonical radiological cases, where anatomy appears in unfamiliar orientations or distorted by pathology, the virtual reality group’s accuracy dropped to 0.52 while the cadaver group achieved 0.71. The mean difference of 0.19, with a 95 percent confidence interval spanning 0.27 down to 0.11, indicates a robust deficit in what cognitive scientists call transfer: the ability to apply knowledge in forms that differ from how it was originally learned. The authors attribute this to what they describe as the representational variability of physical anatomy learning. A cadaver is irreducibly messy, with vessels and nerves varying from body to body, and that messiness forces students to build flexible mental representations. A polished three-dimensional model, by contrast, presents a single idealized anatomy that students may encode rigidly.

The second deficit emerged over time. Thirty minutes after instruction, both groups recalled the material equally well. But at the four-week mark, the virtual reality group’s mean score had fallen to 11.75 while the cadaver group retained a mean of 17.20, a mean difference of 5.45 points with a confidence interval of 8.24 down to 2.66. The statistical interaction between teaching condition and time was significant, reported as F of 2 and 76 equal to 15.38 with p below 0.001 and a partial eta squared of 0.29, meaning nearly a third of the variance in change over time was attributable to the instructional format. The authors suggest this weakening of delayed retrieval may reflect the retrieval demands of physical learning: manipulating a real body, orienting oneself around a table, and searching for structures in variable tissue all create rich, effortful memory-encoding conditions that passive virtual navigation may not replicate.

None of these results should be read as a verdict against virtual reality, and the researchers are careful to say so. The study involved a small sample of forty students, condition was confounded with intact class, and the three focal outcomes were designated for the integrated analysis after the data had been collected, all factors that make the findings exploratory rather than definitive. Ethics approval for the secondary use of anonymized routine assessment data was granted by the Hubei University of Medicine Ethics Review Committee in July 2025, and all participants gave written informed consent. Funding came from a teaching research project at the university’s Yaohu College, which the authors report played no role in the design, analysis or interpretation of the work.

Still, the pattern of results carries a clear message for medical educators weighing the considerable costs of maintaining dissection laboratories against the convenience and scalability of virtual reality. The digital classroom excels at delivering immediate, testable knowledge of anatomical structure, and it does so without the expense, ethical complexity and logistical burden of cadaveric programs. But the study’s evidence points to three specific costs that pure virtual instruction does not currently repay: a near doubling of force applied to real tissue on first contact, a nineteen-percentage-point drop in interpreting noncanonical clinical images, and a progressive loss of retained knowledge over four weeks. Each of these deficits maps onto a capability that matters in clinics and operating rooms, where bodies vary, tissue resists, and knowledge must be summoned months after the lecture.

The authors conclude that virtual reality may be most useful not as a replacement for physical anatomy learning but as a component within a competency-aligned blended curriculum, one that deliberately pairs immersive three-dimensional visualization with the haptic, variable and retrieval-demanding experiences that only real specimens provide. As medical schools worldwide expand their digital offerings, this study offers a concrete template for evaluation: measure not just what students can recognize immediately, but how hard they press, how flexibly they generalize, and how long they remember. By those fuller measures, the virtual body is a powerful teaching aid that has not yet learned to feel, to surprise, or to stick.

Subject of Research: Haptic and cognitive trade-offs of virtual reality versus cadaver-based anatomy education in first-year medical students

Article Title: Haptic and cognitive trade-offs of virtual reality–supported anatomy education: a retrospective multimethod cohort comparison

Article References: Yao, S., Liu, R., & He, X. (2026). Haptic and cognitive trade-offs of virtual reality–supported anatomy education: a retrospective multimethod cohort comparison. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10481-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10481-7

Keywords: virtual reality, anatomy education, medical education, cadaver-based learning, haptic transfer, knowledge retention, educational technology, cohort study, medical imaging, simulation training, cognitive transfer, Hubei University of Medicine