Anatomy Survival: Mastering Med School's Hardest Language with Jason Bourke

A doctor's first patient should never be a living, breathing human being. With medical schools increasingly shifting toward sanitized digital atlases and 3D modeling, the tactile reality of physical medicine is at risk of getting lost in translation. Dr. Jason Bourke is a vertebrate paleontologist and anatomy professor at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine who uses deep-time evolutionary science to teach future physicians how the human body is actually built.

We get into the mechanics of medical education, comparing region-based prosection against traditional dissection models to show how students build a functional three-dimensional map of the body. Dr. Bourke explains how comparative anatomy connects human evolutionary baggage to extinct theropods and crocodilians, using computational fluid dynamics to understand physiology across species. The foundation of his teaching philosophy lies in the ancient Latin phrase mortui vivos docent, the dead teach the living, which reframes deceased body donors not as anatomical specimens, but as a medical student's first true clinical teacher.

Learning anatomy is essentially memorizing a dense foreign language while navigating the heavy emotional reality of working with deceased human donors. To help students process the weight of the cadaver lab, faculty intentionally keep hands and faces covered to preserve tissue and maintain professional boundaries during the hardest parts of the dissection process. Future physicians walk away realizing that anatomical variation is the norm rather than the exception, discovering that real human bodies come layered with fat, fascial anomalies, and decades of physical wear that no textbook or digital table can ever replicate.

If you care about medical school curriculum, comparative anatomy, and the intersection of paleontology and human physiology, you’ll get a lot from this. Be sure to subscribe to the channel and share this episode with anyone interested in the real science of medical training. What is the most fascinating anatomical quirk or evolutionary leftover you've ever wondered about in the human body? Let us know in the comments below.

@arkansasstatemedianetwork.com.

0:00 - Introduction to Med School Anatomy
2:50 - Why Cadaver Labs Beat Digital Tools
9:06 - The Emotional Reality and Donor Ceremonies
12:51 - How the Anatomy Curriculum is Structured
18:45 - What Dinosaurs Teach Us About Human Anatomy
28:38 - Med School Research and Comparative Anatomy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the More Than a Medical School podcast on the Arkansas State Media Network. I'm Casey Pierce. I'm the Director of External Relations and Marketing for NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine. We're a medical school that operates in partnership with Arkansas State on the A-State's Jones Burke campus. And throughout this series, we've brought you a number of our leaders at our medical school to talk about how our curriculum is delivered and the importance of what and how our future physicians are taught, how they learn it. Today we're going to focus on gross anatomy. To fully understand the human body, it's imperative that medical students have a complete knowledge of the different elements that make up the physical human being. Dr. Jason Burke has been at NYTCOM for almost a decade and plays a key role in delivering that curriculum, developing it, and that's a crucial part of the medical education. So today we're going to talk specifically about our anatomy department. Dr. Burt, thanks so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

To uh start, just introduce yourself. Tell us a little about you, your educational background, where you're from, and what brought you to NYT.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Okay. Yeah. Uh my name's Doc, as I mentioned, uh Dr. Jason Burke. Uh I was originally from the Hudson Valley region of New York. So I grew up in Westchester County. Um, and then I did uh my P, I earned my PhD at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, uh, where I was trained to teach medical growth anatomy at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. Um, and from there, after earning my PhD, I went and I did a couple of postdoc rotations or postdoc positions at uh the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. So there I was working in the museum and I would also participate in their field collecting digs, which was in Utah. So it would happen every every summer. It's actually, I think, happening right now. Uh yeah, around 2017 or so, I uh saw it opening here at the Jonesboro campus. So NYIT and Arkansas had just finished their first year, we're getting ready to start their second year. I liked the opportunity to come back and do something where I can go back to doing dissection-based teaching because that was where my training was. I liked to do a lot of the comparative anatomy. And this was also a bit of a sort of a ground floor operation. It was early enough that I can help guide the direction of the anatomy curriculum. And I really was interested in doing that.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Great. So you are a vertebrate paleontologist and also teach anatomy. And we're going to get into uh both of that, but let's start just with the anatomy component. Um, it sounds like common sense, but what exactly do medical students learn in the anatomy lab and why is that so important to their medical education?

SPEAKER_02 2:50

So anatomy is a foundational science of medicine. And it is foundational because, as I like to tell our students, it's foundational because we are anatomy. So everything from the move, the uh anatomy that lets us move around to the neurons firing our brain as we're talking, all of that has a basis in anatomy and physiology. So if a physician wants to be really good at diagnosing and treating a patient's problem, they need a good working understanding of how the human body is put together, what it works, how it works when it is healthy. So then you know what to look for when it is not healthy. So that is the big reason why we teach anatomy.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

And our anatomy lab is cadaver-based. So we have uh whole human donors that come to us and it's taught through uh cadaver dissection. Uh, why is that? I know that did there are a lot of versions, you know, there are digital tools that some schools use, that different ways that you can learn. You are pretty adamant about cadaver-based uh dissection is the best way to learn anatomy. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Yes, that is correct. Uh, I and the rest of our anatomy faculty are both are all strong proponents of donor-based, dissection-based learning of human anatomy. Um, there has been over the past 15 or 20 years or so, a stronger push for um using these more digital options. So, digital anatomy tables, um 3D programs that let you look at different anatomy and like do digital slices through it, even some virtual virtual reality to it. Um, and while these all are useful as supplements to anatomy, we really feel that you can't get past the importance of using real body donors because at the end of the day, these are doctors who are going to be working on real people. And you don't want your doctor's first interaction with a real person to be you. So we have them work with the body donors for that. The other thing is that these digital programs, these sort of cleaned up digital method or digital atlases, they always show, or they often show the like the cleaned up, the perfect version of it. So you don't really get to experience the layers of fat that get in the way, the different fascial layers, how nerves intertwine with arteries, how veins intertwine with arteries. Your body is put together in multiple layers, and those layers interact with each other in different ways. And that interaction tends to get lost in a lot of these digital programs. Even when you use physical models to help guide how uh the anatomy is put together, it still leaves out a lot of how these different structures are interacting at a much deeper level. So when the students have a chance to work with real bodies, so either prosection-based or dissection-based, they actually can see where the fat was removed or how much fat needs to be removed, how many layers deep is this muscle versus that muscle, or how this nerve passes by this artery and how this is layered in this sheath, so on and so forth. So it's it gives them a more realistic understanding of how the human body is put together. The other appeal is, well, multiple appeals, the other, but one of the other appeals is that these are work, these students are working with real body donors, which means these are people who had full lives, oftentimes have been donated after they died in their 70s, 80s, sometimes 90s. So you're looking not just at how the human body is put together, but how functional anatomy works. So you're seeing bodies that have gone through decades of growth and have gained different experiences and have undergone possible decades of abuse. So you can see some of that as well. So damages to lungs, hearts, livers that have taken a long time to develop, things that don't usually appear in these, in these uh digital models. So students get to work with that. This is considered their first patient, so it teaches them a little bit of respect for the patients of how to work together in a small group, because this is also their first time working together as a group, and they need to work together to solve a lot of these programs or a lot of these problems. Um, our lab, like many anatomy labs, does feature the Latin phrase mortu vivos docent. So the dead teach the living. And it's we use that sign as a reminder that the best way really to learn human anatomy is from another human being.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Awesome. And you know, you said it the um you get a lot of um no no human body is the same. So you sometimes artificially in there and they'll see a heart, a artificial heart valve that a patient had. You mentioned like lung damage. If that patient had smoked, they kind of get to see what all that's done. I know um you and a couple of our students a couple years ago uh wrote a research paper about a patient that uh was missing one of the heads of his calf, I believe. Is that accurate? So that's interesting, the way that students get to learn from that variation, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:57

It is nice when we have opportunities like that. Yeah. So every year when we're doing our rotation through the anatomy lab, we often find one or two bodies who are, as I like to say, not textbook. So they don't feature the anatomy the way it is shown in the text or in an atlas. Uh, they may have a different branching pattern to like their brachial artery in their arm. They may have a missing head to their calf muscle, they may have an extra head to one of their hip flexors, which was another case study that some of our students got to write up. But in all of those cases, these were incidental findings. These were people, these were people who did not die from anything related to that. So their anatomy, while different, worked just as well throughout their life. Maybe there, for some, there may have been slight changes to like how their behaviors were when like moving, but for the large part, we're seeing different ways that your body goes about solving the same problem. And that is important because yeah, again, this is the stuff they will see with their real with their living patients, like these kinds of variations, and these are things they'll have to consider if they're doing surgical work or anything involving going into the body.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

For non-medical people like me, the the thought of being in a cadaver lab, sometimes there's a little bit of morbidity to it, a little bit of do our students do you ever get students that when they come in, they you kind of have to help them get over that, or are they generally pretty excited about getting uh involved in the cadaver lab?

SPEAKER_02 9:24

I say it's a mix. We do have students that are a little more shy about coming in. Uh, we do have a lot of students that even during their interview stage have talked about the excitement over actually working with real bodies, doing real dissections, kind of seeing that. So those students are usually good. Others look at it more like sort of the necessary evil, the challenge they have to overcome to get past while I'm working on a real person here. And for those students, we help ease them into it. Um, oftentimes, so our, and then we'll talk about it in a bit, but the way we go through the anatomy curriculum, we usually save the head for last. So the face tends to stay covered. Uh, we do encourage the students to take a look when they feel ready, but usually we keep the face is covered. Um, we also keep hands covered, both from a uh practical point of view, because those can dry out really quick, but also because hands and faces tend to be the most human aspects of us. And so seeing that, uh seeing a donor who has say like recently painted nails is a reminder, well, this is a person who they wanted them to look good as they passed, like during their funeral time. And that can get a little heady for some people. And so it's uh it's a thing we try to um help ease the students into. What if they do have trouble? We will let them like, you know, kind of stand out, take a break. Uh, if it's something they really feel like they can do, we try to find ways to work around it. Um, but for the most part, students usually come in, at least I say neutral with it, which again, I I I feel like there's some self-selection people who want to go into medical who want to become physicians or prepared to do some unsavory stuff.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Right. Yeah, that that kind of goes along with it. And, you know, you mentioned the the respect factor and teaching them all one of the really neat aspects, something that your uh department does is at the end of the the year uh in the spring, we have a donor ceremony uh to honor those individuals that donated their uh their bodies to the medical educate to the medical education of these students. And that's always kind of a somber kind of uh way to respect. And I know that's something that's really important to your team.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

Yes, we really appreciate that every year we do these donor ceremonies. These are student-led, so we let the students know at the end that they are going to be asked to do some kind of ceremony to sort of to show the respect for what they what their experience was in the anatomy lab working with these donors. Uh after aside from that, we really leave a lot of it up to them beyond that. So they figure out what's the most respectful way to showcase their experience. It can be reading poems, uh, sometimes uh singing songs. Uh, often there's a nice like uh memorial candles that get lit. Uh, there's usually some kind of donor gift that's given. So something to that is paid for by the school to in remembrance of or in in respect for those donors. And then all of this stuff gets recorded, and then we send those videos out to the family members who donated, whose family member has donated their bodies to our uh to our school.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Yeah, so they can kind of celebrate that that gift with us. That's really cool. So um, specifically about the anatomy curriculum, the way that it's broken down. Tell me a little bit about that. Do you you walk them through system by system? Is it by um regions of the body? How does that kind of work?

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Our approach is to do region-based. So we will start on somewhere like the back and on the back. The students will learn about the layers of the skin and then the on fascial layers beyond that. So our subcutaneous fat, our membranous layers that are covering the muscles, how each muscle has its own separate compartment, uh, the different muscles that are on the back, the arteries that feed those muscles, the veins that bring the blood back, the nerves that innervate those muscles, and so on. Uh, we'll go deeper beyond that and look at the bones. So we'll look at the bony attachments that those muscles will attach to, and then we'll even go down past the bones and look at the spinal cord and all the different pieces of anatomy inside the spinal cord before we move on to the next, the next section of the body, which could be upper limb or thorax, et cetera. We work our way through region by region. Uh, the appeal of doing this versus just a systems-based is that the students are creating this map in their head early. So they're seeing how all of these different individual systems are working together in this one region and how these systems are then interacting or then related to another system they'll see later. So a lot of the stuff they get on the back, they will see sort of the start of a lot of those systems when they go onto the thorax region or on the arm region. So it helps really build that 3D map of what the anatomy of the body or how the anatomy of the body is all put together and how they're all related.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

And I know so anatomy is for our first-year students, they're pretty much right, is that correct? First year students are the ones that get the gross anatomy and the neuroanatomy. And so in the fall, the first semester is gross anatomy. And I believe you move into the spring and then have neuroanatomy. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 14:33

Yes, yeah, that's how we do it right now. We do gross anatomy all in the fall. So they'll go through the entire body from the from the back all the way, ending on the head and neck region. And then in the in the springtime, we'll do some neuroanatomy. So they'll look at dissected brains and they'll be identifying structures on that and understanding the different neural tracts and how they interact to produce what you see, what you hear, how you think. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Well, you you mentioned uh prosection, I believe, earlier, and correct my terminology for uh the uh marketing guy as opposed to the anatomist. Um, but there's a few different ways to approach it. Why is prosection the um the way that our schools do anatomy? Help us understand exactly our approach and and how that's delivered.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

Uh so prosection uh just means that we have dissected the body ahead of time. So it's dissected by the pros. We do it ahead of time, mostly for uh the convenience of time. So there's a limited amount of time that we have for teaching anatomy, and there's a lot of anatomy to go over. And in our current setup right now, it's hard to find enough time in the semester to let our students participate in cross-dissection. It is a thing we're looking to bring back. Uh in previous years, we've done a nice hybrid of prosection and dissection. So it is a thing we would like to go back to because again, it's an area where students can gain that better appreciation for how the body is put together when they're actually working to find that piece of anatomy. The downside is when you do dissection-based, it takes a lot longer. So for our pro-sections, it lets us show the anatomy we want the students to see and still a real individual, so they can still see that variation, but they don't want to spend as much, they don't have to spend all that time trying to get down to that variation. And for some of the anatomy, it can be very difficult to get those detailed dissections out, especially if it's uh the student's first time doing any kind of dissection. So it's not an area where you want to mess up if you can avoid it. So we do that also for the more detailed dissections, just let them see what it is we want them to see.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Yeah, makes sense. So, what's something our future medical students need to know about anatomy curriculum and how it's delivered? I know we've we've talked a lot about it, but I know you said that you speak with our incoming students and just give our audience kind of what you give our students when they get here is what to expect.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

So I guess the first thing that I always bring up is that anatomy is hard. There's no way around it. It's just it's a lot of material to learn, and there's not a lot of time to do it. Our curriculum is a bit compressed for that, but even if it extended over the entire four-year term of medical school, it would still not be enough time to really gain an understanding of a really strong foundation of that anatomy, right? So it's it's basically learning a foreign language, right? You could be a level 100 in Duolingo and still feel really awkward trying to have any conversation in that language with anatomy. You could spend that full four years learning bits and pieces of the anatomy, and you're still gonna be a little unsure about what you're looking at. It's a thing that takes many years of consistent practice looking at these material to really gain a strong foundation. And that's a thing you will get later on in your career as you start specializing, start working with more of that same anatomy again. So you'll gain that stronger understanding as you go. Our goal is not to make you like experts in the field by the end of that first semester or even the end of the fourth semester. It's just to give you that's that toolkit, right? To to really give you the understanding of all the anatomy that you are expected to know so that the next time you see it, it's not the first time you see it. So it can kind of jog your memory. And that's a thing that we have seen with our students in the past who've gone through anatomy and then they've come back to be tutors, or they've come back to be scholars, or they've done some of our outreach events. And when they do so, they often come back to us just surprised at how much they remember from that time in the anatomy lab. So it's it's a lot, but if you stick with it, you will come out with a strong toolkit that will let you continue on through medical school.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

So you have an extensive background in paleontology. And so, as is the case with a lot of our anatomy faculty, you teach uh during the fall and into the spring, and then you get some of your spring and a lot of your summers to do dinosaur research. And you uh so tell us a little bit about that, how that interest came about and and and what that looks like.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

Uh well, interest came about because like many a dinosaur paleontologist, you get that dinosaur bug when you're like three or four years old. Uh, in my case, I remember the dinosaur book my mother read to me when I was younger. I think it was for bedtime. And the next thing I knew, I was just like really focused on that. Um uh and then unlike most people, I just never got past the bug. So I continued on through my education and went on to become verbal paleontologists. So yeah, now my work is studying dinosaurs and different critters, uh, extinct animals. Uh, and then I do that in the usually in the spring, summer semester when it's more freed up. Sometimes some of it in the fall, it depends on what's working, uh, what students I may be working with at the time and how we can put different projects together.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

So you're studying fossils to learn about the their anatomy and kind of how things have changed, how that function. Is that kind of help me out there?

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Yeah. So here I brought some. Yeah, you brought some brothers. We'll see what shows up here.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

So if you're on uh if you're on our audio feed, you may need to switch over to our our video here. But uh Dr. Burke has some um anatomical models here of some dinosaurs that he's gonna show us. So tell us about some of his projects. Okay, so there we go.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

All right, so here is our I brought this guy along. This is uh Tyrannosaurus Rex, very popular dinosaur, kind of your standard big theropod that we're all aware of. So this is one of the animals that I've worked with in the past. Uh, this is a one-sixth, one-sixth scale model. So imagine a scale about six times bigger, a lot harder to fit into this room. So most of these animals like this T-Rex, we just have the bones to work with. And so we want to figure out what the soft tissue was that are inside those bones, right? So all of our, just like with us, the bones are really there to be the scaffolding for all the muscles that are sitting on top of it, the blood vessels that are running underneath it, and the air spaces in between it. So, and then for reference for those at home, don't have a pen on me, but you can see right there is where the eye would be, and then right over here is where our nose would be. And then all these spaces in here are just these openings in the skull that were etched out by what we call paranasosinuses. These are bits of epithelial tissue that eat their way through the bone and just take away bone that they don't need. So it's a thing that was uh studied by actually my advisor at the time to figure out we have structures similar to this in our skull. It's much more extreme in these dinosaurs because they go all the way through, whereas ours just leave empty spaces. So, for instance, we have a big maxillary sinus that is just right here by our cheekbones, and that's an enclosed space. It's the area that helps sort of increase the timbre of our voice, uh, but also is what uh makes it really hard to drain your nose when you're sick. So that's a fun time to understand. How these soft tissues are put in place on an animal like this. Put this over here.

unknown 22:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

There you go. Nice and pretty there. Yeah. We use animals that are closely related to them. So we have our crocodilians like this guy right here. So this is our siamese crocodile that is having trouble getting its jaw back. There we go. We got a little siamus crocodile right there. Also, not to scale, this is from a much larger animal. But we have these guys that are closely related to dinosaurs. And then, of course, we have birds like this harpy eagle right there, which are descendants of dinosaurs. So between these two, as well as some of their other animals. I'm just going to put everything on here. Other animals, again, such as There we go. So lizards here, turtles there, kind of representing the whole mix. We look at the anatomy, the shared anatomy between all of these animals, and we look for shared homologous. So structures that were shared and inherited structures. We can use these structures to tell us. I'm sorry, we can use these structures to tell us what kind of structures were likely present in the dinosaurs. So if a crocodile and a bird share the same type of anatomy and it leaves the same kind of like same kind of scarring or process on a bone, we can say that that's probably from this same muscle. And we can put together the muscles the same way on that. If we look at the way that the nasal passage is put together, how the eye develops, we can see the same pattern in our crocodiles and our birds, our turtles, and our lizards, and we can say, okay, this same pattern is probably in the dinosaurs too. It's just scaled up. So we're changing the direction on that. Um, I do go a step further beyond this. There we go. So I do go a step further than just the comparative anatomy for reconstruction, but I also use a way to test that anatomy. So I'm interested in the physiology of these extinct animals. So to reconstruct that physiology, which you can imagine is kind of hard when the animal is long dead, I utilize different engineering techniques. Uh, one, one of which is uh called computational fluid dynamics. This lets me simulate the movement of air or blood or heat transfer through parts of the anatomy, and this lets me test the sort of the functional limits of that reconstructed anatomy. And that lets me say allows me to say something about what the limits were for these dinosaurs for things like how fast could they breathe air in and out, how well was that nose at cooling and warming air, or how fast could the blood move through the system. Other studies uh using finite element analysis have looked at bones to see just or looked at the bones and the muscles that have been reconstructed to see just how strong an animal like T-Rex could bite, and just how strong the skull was to withstand that. So all these different structures or these different methods that we use to bring these dinosaurs back to life.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Cool. And there is obviously a lot of crossover between your learning about anatomy about structures, it really plays into your ability to teach about human anatomy as well.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Yes. So I am one of three paleontologists that are working on this campus. There's another six or seven or so that are on the New York campus, all of which are working with our medical students. Uh, vertebrate paleontology in the vertebrate paleontology to med school pipeline is actually a pretty common field for paleontologists to go into. So you kind of have that field paleo, university work, and then med school. But it's been around for a long time. Some of the earliest medical, some of the earliest um paleontologists started off as medical doctors. So we've had this strong association with medical schools. And part of the appeal of that is, as again, I like to say to my students, physicians are too busy being physicians to teach the next generation, at least when it comes to anatomy. As you get further in your career, as you get more specialized as a physician, you wind up learning a lot about your region of anatomy, but the rest of the anatomy kind of starts to fall back in a way. So when you hire paleontologists, we're always looking at anatomy of a bunch of different animals. Uh, so we're stay very up to date on our anatomical knowledge. So we're able to use that when we're teaching human anatomy. The other appeal is because humans are vertebrates, we have we have inherited all the same toolkit as our dinosaurs, as our crocodiles, as our birds. So you see a lot of the same structures in these animals. So you see all the same structures in these animals, and you can use humans as just sort of another variation on that theme. So that lets us teach the anatomy in a in a way that's very strong, foundational. Uh, the other appeal as a paleontologist is we offer this deep time perspective on the anatomy. So there's a lot of anatomy in our bodies that does not make sense if you were to just build a person, right? So the classic example from this is a nerve that goes to our voice box, so the larynx. And that nerve goes, starts in our head and goes all the way down by our heart before it flips all the way back up again to get up to our larynx. And along the way down, it doesn't do anything, it just runs along, doesn't innervate anything else until it goes back up to hit the voice box. Doesn't make sense the way it's put together in us. It's taken to an extreme in giraffes, which will also do that same thing. But if we follow that anatomy back far enough in time, we can get to where it first starts, somewhere in fish, where that anatom where that layer, that same nerve, instead of popping out and going down, just pops straight, straight across to reach the structure that it's going for. So in our case, we decided we were going to grow next, and the process of growing next kind of dragged that nerve down with it because it was stuck where it belonged. So this is us dealing with that evolutionary baggage. And there's other structures, other nerves that do these weird paths, other arteries that take weird paths, uh, weird muscles that do the same thing, the way we stand up straight has different implications for how our our backbones work versus other animals' backbones. These are all things that we are able to add to students, which may not help them become the greatest physicians, but it will add to their knowledge of, well, why does this go down here? And why, like, why, if I'm working on someone's heart anatomy, do I need to worry about them losing their voice? So things like that.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah. So the whole structure of how the whole how the big puzzle is put together and kind of give some rhyme and reason to why. That makes a lot of sense. So you do have students that are involved in research with you as well. What do those opportunities look like and how do they benefit from those?

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Yes. So I work with our NYIT medical students. Um, usually in their second semester or their second year, start of their second semester, they will reach out looking for research opportunities. Uh, very important now for a lot of their med school med students to look for research opportunities as a way to stand out. Um, a good student will be able to stay in my lab for a few years working on the anatomy that's or working on a project. Um, other struct other and other students who work with me are our anatomy scholars. These are students who are taking a full year to help us teach anatomy, but also to do research in anatomy. So these are all areas where our med students can participate. But I also work with our Arkansas State University students. So undergraduate students, uh, master's students, PhD, all can run through a lab as well, doing different research projects. And again, the effect, the uh the appeal of working in my lab is dinosaurs. But aside from that, it's also just it's learning a lot of comparative anatomy, learning how to do these soft tissue reconstructions, testing the anatomy using these different engineering techniques. So students who are interested in my college of math and engineering or anything like that, and they want to do more of that sort of biomedical or biomechanical stuff, there's opportunities in there. And then uh, yeah, a lot of just yeah, the comparative. Oh, and then um because a lot of the anatomy we look at, aside from doing comparative dissections, is also done the the uh 3D rendering of these of that anatomy, which happens by CT scanning these animals. So we run them through a CT scanner and we get those images, our students become very well versed in reading radiographic imaging, which is a thing that our medical students are taught in their first curriculum and their first semester as well. And it's just a generally useful tool to have if you're doing anything in the medical field or a lot of this organismal biology field.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Awesome. Well, very cool stuff, very informative. Uh, Dr. Burke, thanks for your time today. Uh, this has been a great conversation. We hope you've yeah, learned something about how uh medical students are taught anatomy, how that process looks like. If you've enjoyed our podcast and you want to learn more about our medical school, you can visit us online. Our website is nyit.edu slash Arkansas. Our social media channels are at nyitcom ar as in nyitcom Arkansas. Uh, we hope you've enjoyed our conversation today. We look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks so much.