The Creation of High-Resolution Brain Cross-sections for 3D Printing and Virtual Reality Applications

Technologies such as 3D printing and virtual/augmented reality have great potential for improving the teaching of highly spatial topics such as neuroanatomy. We created a set of 3D printed and virtual brain cross-sections using a high-resolution MRI dataset. These resources have been made freely available via online repositories. We also report a pilot study of the use of both the physical and virtual specimens in the classroom. Students completed a lab exercise where they used either the 3D printed or virtual brain sections to order a set of axial slices from dorsal to ventral. They then labeled the different structures that they found useful in determining the slices' positions. We measured the students' ability to localize 2D brain cross-sections before and after the lab exercise. Overall, we saw pre- to post-test increases in accuracy on a brain cross-sections task compared to a lecture-based neuroanatomy instruction.