Cost-Effective Generation of 360° Rotational Pathology Specimens

Abstract

Placement of students off campus and an expectation by students that they should be able to access pathology learning materials anywhere anytime meant that our traditional pathology museum was no longer meeting their learning expectations or needs. To counter this, we used a low cost method to develop an online pathology museum of 952 specimens that can be accessed using any device. The 360° rotatable and zoomable virtual specimens were created using NZ$400 (US$300) of equipment and 800 hours of student labour. This article describes the technical construction process of the 360° rotational pathology specimens as well as a user-friendly interface platform that is easy to update and maintain. Virtual pathology specimens created using high-resolution photographs have been shown to benefit medical students with increased accessibility and availability compared to physical specimens. Medical schools also benefit from the low maintenance cost and storage requirement of virtual platforms.