KIPS BAY — Students at the NYU School of Medicine don't use microscopes.
The machines, commonly thought of as a staple of medical education, have all been given away, donated to area schools in need.
But the reason is not purely altruistic.
NYU’s medical students don’t need the devices anymore because the school’s division of educational informatics has created a virtual version that allows users to zoom in and out with the ease of Google Maps.
Dr. Marc Triola leads the division that develops all the high-tech gadgets for the NYU School of Medicine, which has more than 700 students. The push for greater technological innovation — including abandoning outdated devices like microscopes and practicing on "virtual cadavers" — is part of an overall effort to change the way the school has been teaching medicine.
The core of the shift is the school’s new curriculum, known as C21, which was officially implemented at the start of the 2011-2012 academic year.
“It’s a dramatic change in the structure of our medical school,” Triola said in an interview.
Traditionally, medical school divides its four-year program into two classroom years and two years working with patients, Triola said. Under the new curriculum, NYU will change that ratio to one-and-a-half years of in-class instruction and two-and-a-half years working at patients’ bedsides, the doctor said, adding that even those first few months of medical school can involve patient interaction.
“We want to foster our students learning about the basic science … in the context of thinking of patients,” Triola said. “The students really prefer that.”
A key component of the C21 curriculum is an emphasis on computer-assisted learning, like with the virtual microscopes, he explained.
The technology allows students to scan a slide into a computer and take a huge digital picture of it. Using Google Maps technology, students can then zoom in on the cellular level of a sample, Triola said.
The school has also started teaching with virtual cadavers to supplement the real ones dissected in anatomy labs, Triola added. Called the BioDigital Human, the sophisticated 3D technology used for the cadavers was developed at the school in collaboration with a company called BioDigital Systems and is the first of its kind, he said.
“[Students] can zoom in and out,” Triola noted. “And they can also do things like remove different layers of tissue or bone and see inside in ways that are really impossible when you have to obey the laws of physics with a real human cadaver.”
While working with real cadavers requires time in a lab, the doctor noted that the BioDigital Human is available online for students to access around the clock seven days a week.
“We’re not eliminating the real thing in any way. The real thing is still a critical and important part of medical education,” Triola said. “It was about, 'How do we make this experience even more educationally powerful?'”
Since the curriculum changes are all relatively new, the doctor said he wasn’t sure if the advancements had already influenced enrollment. But he added that prospective students visiting the school were taking notice — and those already immersed in the C21 curriculum have embraced it.
“They are digital natives,” he said. “So this was really quite natural to them.”
