Enhancing Anatomy Learning Through Enhanced 3D Visualization: A Study on Student Perception and Engagement in...

Effective anatomy education is essential for medical training. While traditional anatomy instruction provides essential foundational knowledge, its effectiveness depends on the instructional format, level of interaction, and availability of clinical integration, especially in resource-limited settings. Building on a prior study that achieved 86.5% clinical proficiency, this research evaluates an enhanced 3D visualization platform designed to improve anatomical understanding, clinical reasoning, and interdisciplinary collaboration through immersive, museum-based learning. The study is a mixed-method study that uses 120 undergraduate medical students (60 Target Group, 60 Control Group) at King Khalid University in a 15-week semester aiming to investigate the usage of a deep learning pipeline and a more novel approach to teaching anatomy based on an enhanced platform of 3D visualization. The Target Group interacts with a web-based application (written in WebGL and Three.js) with an integrated deep learning pipeline comprising of the PointNeXt backbone and AnatoVision Block (AVB) to perform automated annotation of anatomical structures, including brain and heart regions, with high-confidence identification of regions. The platform has a variety of components that simplify the teaching of anatomy, and this pipeline supports these components, namely, the Clinical Case Simulator (CCS) to learn about interactive clinical scenarios (i.e., fracture diagnosis and surgery childhood) and the Adaptive Learning Optimizer (ALO) to learn about creating structured learning paths based on individual requirements of students and guided tours involving a visit to a museum to better understand the real-life contexts of the anatomical structures. The Control Group uses the traditional teaching methods of teaching anatomy and does not have access to the deep learning enhanced platform. The timetable of the study consists of an orientation during Week 1 to familiarize with the deep learning features of the platform, exploration during Weeks 2-13 to learn about interactive modules and 3D models, a post-assessment in Week 14 to assess the knowledge of the anatomy, and a final assessment in Week 15. The pre- and post-intervention questionnaires are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching model; the teaching model will assess the anatomical knowledge, engagement and clinical reasoning skills with specific questions on diagnostic and surgical skills, and the qualitative feedback through interviews to determine the contribution of the deep learning pipeline to the learning experience. Target Group showed great improvements with the highest accuracy of 91.7% in clinical reasoning tasks (Table 3) compared to the Control Group of 67.5% (Table 6, p = 0.001) and the post-intervention Clinical Relevance score of 4.42 ± 0.65 (Table 2). The collaboration scores were 4.28 ± 0.64 (Table 4), and 85% of students reported an improvement in the interactions with peers (Table 5). There was a high level of engagement as the 95% of students reported enhanced engagement due to guided tours (Table 5) indicated in a 150 per cent improvement in Interaction Frequency (12 to 30, Fig. 7). The user reported ease of use (Table 5) 81.7 out of 21.7 had technical challenges (Previous work). The improved 3D visualization platform is a massive improvement to medical education as it enhances aspects such as clinical preparedness, diagnosis quality, and collaboration but is scalable to the resource-constrained environment because of its web-based concept. The combination of the Clinical Case Simulator, Adaptive Learning Optimizer, and Peer Feedback Analyzer and museum-based learning combines theory in anatomy and practical application in practice. Technical barriers in future studies should be discussed, and longitudinal tests should be taken to provide a lasting clinical skill maintenance.