Is Anatomy Dissection still relevant in this digital age? - The perceptions of first year medical students: A cross sectional study

Introduction: With the advancement of technology and development of new teaching and training methods, the role of age old teaching methods like anatomy dissection is being increasingly debated. Many western universities have increased the curriculum space for these new teaching methods, at the cost of dissection. There are no data from India on perceptions and utility of anatomy dissection from the student’s perspective. The current study is aimed to assess the student preferences regarding the learning methods of human anatomy and to analyze the perceptions of the medical students on human anatomy dissection Materials and methods: The study was a cross sectional study of 480 randomly selected medical students, conducted across six medical institutions in Tamil Nadu. The sampling method used was multistage simple random sampling. Results: Out of 480, 463 students consented to participate in the study, with a response rate of 96.45%. The mean age of the participants was 17.79 (±0.83) years. Males constituted 49.02% of the study population. Dissection was ranked as the most preferred method by 244 (52.7%) of the students, followed by computer assisted learning 65 (14.0%) and Demonstration (9.7%). Strong positive agreement was displayed by the students for items describing that dissection may help in dealing with patients comfortably in future (51.40%) and dissection makes them feel different and special from other peers (64.14%). Conclusions: Human anatomy dissection is still the preferred method of anatomy learning among the medical students. Human touch, perceptions and aura associated in the family members and friends in other specialties are the most important factors fostering positive attitude towards dissection.