Chapelle’s 3-D anatomy table reveals hidden life

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

It’s called “The Anatomage Table,” and to see it in the hands of anatomy and physiology students at Archbishop Chapelle High School is like watching a hybrid of the coolest video game you’ve ever seen and the television morgue at “CSI: New Orleans.”

After seeing the 3-D anatomy visualization and virtual dissection system displayed at a science teachers’ workshop in Baton Rouge a year ago, Chapelle science teacher Judy Merrill got on her cell phone and started calling and texting anyone who would listen. Essentially, her plaintive message was, “We need this!”

Twelve months and $85,000 later – the amount raised by creative fundraising – Chapelle’s anatomy and physiology students are spending 80 minutes of class time, two or three times a week, mesmerized by a computerized anatomy table that provides realistic views inside the human body, with the bonus that if their virtual knives happen to slip, there’s no harm, no foul.

Delves deeply within body
The Anatomage can rotate bodies 360 degrees on command, remove the skin to peek inside, show the spaghetti-style routing of blood vessels and peer deep inside the brain.

“I really didn’t know what to expect because when they told us about it, I was having little dreams about it,” Chapelle senior Hannah Hauck said, smiling. “So when I saw it, it was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a whole body in there!’ The first thing I did, because I was so excited, was to pull up an eyeball and cut it open because I wanted to see what was inside there. It was just super exciting to play with it.”

There are actually four “bodies” inside the Anatomage – two men and two women who donated their bodies for research – and the pictures stored inside the table offer an anatomical realism that is off the charts.

“The biggest benefit is that the girls are excited about going to class,” said Danielle Rohli, Chapelle’s dean of academics. “Not that they’re not normally excited, but this makes it the most exciting part of their day. You can see them almost running to class.”

“They kept asking, ‘Can we play with the table?’” Merrill said. “They don’t even realize they’re learning. They’re asking me, ‘Can you set us up with a quiz?’ This is like taking flashcards of a muscle and turning it into something fun.”

The Anatomage arrived on Nov. 30 – Chapelle is the only college-preparatory school in the state to have one – and after a few days of set-up, students began using it in early December. 

Before the table, Chapelle students were taught anatomy based on textbooks and laptop visuals, Rohli said.

“We did our best to show them as much as possible the real muscles, but most of the time we were talking about humans, and we didn’t have that capability,” Rohli said. “So, most of it was in a book. The students did have the ability to go to the internet, and there’s a lot out there. But here, you can have 12 girls standing around the table and interacting with the body. And, it’s life size, which is amazing.”

The variety of life
Rohli said the pictures are stunning.

“You have the ability to dissect any way you want,” she said. “You can slice it in half and then turn it and see a cross section.”

Merrill said the table, which measures 86 by 28 inches and can be flipped into a vertical position, brings home the message to students that no two bodies are exactly alike.

“When you’re looking in a book, everything is flat and one-dimensional, and every picture looks the same,” Merrill said. “I try to teach them that just as (people) look different on the outside, they look different on the inside. Each of the stored cadavers looks different. So, you might have organs that are little shifted or one that is smaller than another.”

The anatomy students still do some old-fashioned dissection of fetal pigs and cats in the lab, but Merrill says the Anatomage “adds another layer of understanding. We (normally) use the cat to understand the muscles of the human body. But this is allowing us to see the muscles in all their layers, where we couldn’t do that with a textbook. You’re looking at superficial muscles and then imagining what’s underneath. Here, you can remove the muscle and see how it’s all physically connected.”

Chapelle’s faculty is meeting to dream up ways to use the Anatomage in conjunction with other classes. Religion classes have made use of the table to display the growth of the unborn baby through birth, with the emphasis on the reality of life from the moment of conception; history students have researched the mummification process; and the school is planning to offer a “veterinary tech” elective next year.

With an eye toward measuring results, Chapelle is planning to track how many of its graduates eventually go on to medical or nursing studies in college.

“Last year we had an unusually large number of girls interested in nursing and possibly medicine, so that was another reason why we said we really needed to get this,” Rohli said. “This is going to help them so much.”

“I really have always been interested in going into medical school, and I recently decided I want to do forensic pathology and perform autopsies,” said Hauck, who will graduate in May. “So this is like the coolest thing for me because I get to just look at a body and cut it open. That's eventually where I want to end up, so it’s making me realize that’s what I want.”

pfinney@clarionherald.org