VR Anatomy

What it is

A virtual-reality application for learning human anatomy, developed inside the Centro de Ingeniería Biomédica at the UANL Faculty of Medicine. The premise: take a real CT, rebuild it as a clean 3D mesh, and put the student inside the model — rotating, walking around, and inspecting structures at scale instead of staring at flat 2D slices.

Authored with T. Alarcón, Ing. R. López, and Dr. A. Sánchez Uresti — the same lab that ran the 3D-printing program.

Why VR

Traditional anatomy depends on cadaveric material — scarce, expensive, and not scalable. VR doesn't replace the cadaver lab; it gives students an extra surface to repeat exposure on, especially for the spatial relationships that are hardest to recover from a textbook diagram.

The deck cited Christou (2010) and Ausubel & Novak (1983) on the limits of the traditional model — frequent, clear exposition still leaves surface-level learning. VR is a complement, not a replacement.

The pipeline

Four steps, end to end.

1 · CT → segmentation. Start with a clinical CT and segment the structures of interest ^[1].

2 · 3D reconstruction. In 3DSlicer v4.8, build a clean mesh — in the proof of concept, the bony structures of the foot ^[2].

3 · Engine + interaction. Move the mesh into Godot 3.0.2, build the UI, scale the camera, set up the controls ^[3].

4 · Stereoscopic view. Split-screen rendering for a phone-grade headset (Vorago VR-100, ~MX$300) — the affordable end of the headset cost ladder the deck mapped against Oculus Go, HoloLens, Vive ^[4].

The app in motion

Two short captures from the working build — UI navigating between the loaded model, controls, and the stereoscopic camera ^[5][6]. Open-source toolchain end to end, smartphone-class hardware on the user side.

What it shipped

• A working VR anatomy prototype running on a sub-MX$300 phone-VR rig — proving the model could reach a student without a five-figure headset.
• An end-to-end open-source pipeline (CT → 3DSlicer → Godot) the group could hand to another student to extend.
• Two posters in the 2018 congress circuit — VI Encuentro de Jóvenes Investigadores (CONACYT / UANL) and the IX Congreso Nacional de Imagen Diagnóstica y Tratamiento at BUAP, Puebla.

What it argued

The same thing the 3D-printing program argued, in a different medium: the question isn't can we use this technology in medical education? — it's does this change the learning enough to be worth the workflow? For complex 3D anatomy, the answer was yes.

Reference

Aguilar, E.; Alarcón, T.; López, R.; Sánchez Uresti, A. Realidad Virtual para el Aprendizaje de la Anatomía Humana. Centro de Ingeniería Biomédica, Facultad de Medicina, UANL · 2018.