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 conventional way of making MXenes reads like a chain of laboratory chores. It begins with a precursor called a MAX phase, a layered ceramic powder that must itself be synthesized. That powder is then combined with a liquid etchant, most commonly hydrofluoric acid, agitated repeatedly, washed, and spun in a centrifuge multiple times to strip away the reaction byproducts. What emerges is MXene material in a form that still demands further processing into an ink, a coating, or a film before it can be put to work. Each of these stages adds cost and time, and the wet chemical etching generates toxic waste while potentially leaving flaws on the surfaces of the delicate flakes. Although the process has been tuned to yield a wide range of chemical compositions and scaled to kilograms per day, its dependence on a separately synthesized precursor has remained a fundamental constraint.

Yury Gogotsi, distinguished university and Bach chair professor in Drexel’s Nick Howley College of Engineering and Computing and one of the discoverers of MXenes, led the new study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Being able to combine a solid metal source with abundant and inexpensive gaseous reactants to form MXenes directly, he explained, opens a fundamentally different manufacturing pathway. The approach builds on a vapor-phase deposition process pioneered by researchers at the University of Chicago, who reported the first chemical vapor deposition synthesis of MXene, but it introduces markedly cheaper starting materials: titanium tetrachloride, an industrial commodity already produced in enormous quantities to make titania, the white pigment found in paint and sunblock, and methane, the principal component of natural gas.

The experimental recipe is disarmingly simple compared with its wet-chemical rival. The researchers placed titanium powder in a quartz carrier tube, introduced methane, and heated the mixture in a conventional tube furnace to trigger the reaction. As the hot gaseous mixture cooled, a layer of crystalline MXene, specifically the compound Ti2CCl2, formed on the quartz substrate. No MAX phase synthesis preceded the reaction, and no acid etching followed it. Hyunho Kim, a research professor at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and first author of the paper, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral assistant in Gogotsi’s laboratory, emphasized that growing crystalline MXene directly from abundant precursors, without first making and etching extra precursor materials, represents a significant development. MXene inks made by selective etching, he noted, remain valuable for coatings and printed devices, while vapor-phase synthesis offers a complementary route to crystals with extremely low defect density for future electronics, optics, and quantum technologies.

Beyond simplifying the supply chain, the team discovered that they could exert meaningful control over the material by manipulating the geometry of the reaction itself. By increasing the exposed surface area of the titanium and confining the reaction within a narrow carrier tube, they found that MXene formed on the quartz substrate without ever making direct contact with the solid titanium source. Under these confined conditions, the material self-organized into rounded structures known as spherulites, which together formed a porous nanocrystal network. The confined space, the researchers concluded, drives saturation of titanium chloride vapor to the level required for two-dimensional crystal growth, a key chemical mechanism that explains why the process works and how it might be tuned.

Time proved to be another powerful dial. As the synthesis proceeded for longer periods, the researchers observed continuous lateral growth into larger flakes. Individual spherulites expanded outward and merged with their neighbors, producing swirl-like crystalline domains containing individual flakes tens of micrometers across. This behavior demonstrates that crystalline two-dimensional MXene can be synthesized directly through a gas-to-solid growth process, and the sustained lateral expansion hints at something even more ambitious: the feasibility of producing large-area, and eventually wafer-scale, MXene crystals using equipment and principles familiar to the semiconductor industry.

The industrial logic of the process may prove to be its most compelling feature. Gogotsi pointed out that the new method shares important similarities with the chloride route used for industrial titania production. Both rely on titanium tetrachloride as a high-temperature vapor precursor; conceptually, methane supplies the carbon in the MXene process just as oxygen is used to form titania. Because titanium chloride is already handled at a very large industrial scale to produce millions of tons of titania each year, the same engineering principles could ultimately be adapted to produce inexpensive MXene powder in ton-scale quantities. For a material whose commercial adoption has been throttled by manufacturing complexity, that parallel to one of chemistry’s largest commodity processes is a striking endorsement of scalability.

Cost reduction extended to the metal source as well. Whereas the original University of Chicago study used high-purity titanium foil as its starting material, the Drexel-led group sourced its precursor from titanium sponge, an abundant industrial product that is substantially less expensive than high-purity titanium. Combined with the elimination of the MAX phase synthesis and the acid-etching steps, along with their associated toxic waste streams, the economics of MXene production begin to look radically different. Fewer steps mean fewer opportunities for contamination and defects, and gaseous precursors lend themselves to the kind of continuous, controlled manufacturing that has made electronic-grade materials affordable at scale.

The implications reach well beyond cheaper powders. According to the researchers, continued control over nucleation and lateral growth could eventually enable large-area, low-defect MXene crystals and even wafer-scale conducting films suitable for electronics, optical communication, and quantum computing. Crystalline films grown directly from the vapor phase, with their extremely low defect densities, are precisely the form factor demanded by next-generation devices, where flake boundaries and surface imperfections degrade performance. A route that grows such crystals directly on a substrate, from commodity chemicals, in a conventional tube furnace, positions MXenes to compete with established two-dimensional materials on the manufacturing terms that matter most.

Challenges remain before MXenes move from the quartz tube to the factory floor. The next phase of the research will focus on refining the process to ensure structural uniformity, increasing flake size, and achieving precise control over the surface chemistry of the resulting materials, which governs how MXenes conduct charge and interact with their environment. The team also intends to adapt the process to produce MXenes with other chemical compositions, broadening the palette of properties available to device designers. Still, the demonstration that a material born in an acid flask can now be grown as a crystalline film from natural gas and a paint pigment precursor marks a turning point. The discovery of a key chemical mechanism for scalable vapor-phase growth suggests that the barriers that have kept MXenes in the laboratory for a decade and a half may finally be dissolving, one wafer at a time.

Subject of Research: Vapor-phase chemical synthesis of two-dimensional Ti2CCl2 MXene crystals for scalable industrial production

Article Title: New process for making MXenes via vapor-phase synthesis could expand technological applications

Article References: New process for making MXenes via vapor-phase synthesis could expand technological applications. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: MXenes, two-dimensional materials, chemical vapor deposition, titanium tetrachloride, nanomaterials, Drexel University, energy storage, quantum computing, materials science, Ti2CCl2, thin films, industrial manufacturing