lecturer University of Saskatchewan Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Abstract Body : Introduction & Objective: We hypothesize that a flexible new way of visualizing anatomical variants by means of our version of “set theory” can help students and others better “see” (and so, better learn and remember) the relationships between those variants and their names.
Seeing anatomical variation wholistically is difficult. Especially when many variants of a particular structure have been attested (and/or are plausible), it is hard to visualize them in any useful “collective” way. As the number of variants increases, the number of kinds of variation often also increases, further confounding our ability to mentally organize the individual variants themselves, the relationships between them, and their names, in useful ways.
In this poster, we present some ways of grouping (or “stacking”) variants by type, in order to facilitate their sorting into “sets,” with each set containing all the anatomical variants (both attested and plausible) broadly subsumed by whatever definition is given to the set in question.
The result, for any given complex arterial structure and its major variants, should be one or more easily comprehensible visual arrangements of parts which can be quickly understood and whose names can be easily remembered.
Methods: In our poster, we present several complex vascular systems, with a number of their anatomical variants grouped into sets. In each set, the “elements” (that is, the individual variants) share a minimal number of common features, and we suggest nomenclatural improvements.
Results: The examples we show in the poster illustrate some of the (to us) exciting simplifications of complexity achievable by our methods of visualization; we leave it to viewers to help us assess their utility.
Conclusions: Nomenclatural problems are amenable to our schematizations, although each vascular system presented requires its own specific modifications.
Significance: In a world where students increasingly have to rely on brute memorization, it is increasingly important to explore the benefits offered by any potentially useful alternative. In particular, visualizations such as ours can help alleviate the “bar-code” problem–wherein the thing memorized and its name are equally unintelligible, with the result that knowing the one doesn’t facilitate the learning and remembering of the other.
