The Digital Advantage

Medical Students taking first-year histology courses used to spend hours in the laboratory centering and focusing slides of cells, tissues and organs under a microscope. Now, students with a laptop computer and Internet access can do their lab work wherever and whenever it’s convenient — at Starbucks, McDonald’s or the kitchen table on Saturday night — using the Medical School’s new digital microscopy resource.

Matt Velkey (Ph.D. 2005), a lecturer in cell and developmental biology, directs the histology course and helped implement the digital microscopy program, along with Lloyd Stoolman, M.D., professor of pathology, and staff in the Taubman Medical Library and Medical School Information Services.

From the instructor’s point of view, Velkey says digital slides are a better teaching tool. They eliminate the aggravation of handling microscope slides, as well as the inconvenience and confusion that can result when teacher and student are trying to look at the same slide. With digital slides and a laptop computer, students can take notes and ask questions while looking at the same image at the same time as the instructor.

First-year medical student Conroy Chow gives the program a positive review. “With digital microscopy, all the students are looking at the same slides, and our professors can quickly show a certain slide to the entire class to highlight a particularly difficult object to identify,” Chow says. “This would be much more difficult to do with variations across individual glass slides.”

The program works on the same principle as Google Earth. The server stores a one-gigabyte file of the original, high resolution image and then delivers only a portion of that image over the Web when requested. By giving users pixels on demand, the server can accommodate many users querying the same image at the same time, with access available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Even examinations are now given over the Web, using an honor system. “Quizzes and exams typically open on Friday night and close on Sunday at midnight,” Velkey says. “Students come to the library and log in with their honor code number and a password to access the examination server.” Students get about one hour for each quiz, and exams take around three hours. Under the old system of laboratory practicums, examinations were a nerve-wracking affair where students had just 90 seconds to answer each question before moving on to the next station.

“It limited the kinds of questions you could ask,” Velkey says. “Now that it’s all online in a virtual slide, you can put an arrow on the slide, and ask a second-order question, like ‘What is the function of this cell?’ It’s more than just rote identification.”

For medical students, the biggest advantage of digital microscopy may be the ability to do homework in their underwear, but the real benefit is giving future physicians a better clinical understanding of the course material. It trades a source of technological frustration — the microscope and all its limitations — for a much more powerful learning and teaching tool. —Catherine Shaffer

Summer in Geneva

The summer of 2008 will be a summer to remember for first-year medical students Sara Haack and Maggie Kober. The two women will spend eight weeks working and studying at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, as participants in Duke University’s Global Health Fellows Program.

U-M students who participated in the program previously were Adam Castano, a third-year student; Allison Leung, in her second year; Bina Valsangkar, fourth-year; and Tanyaporn Wansom, fifth-year.

Open to graduate students worldwide, the Global Health Fellows Program combines an eight- to 10-week health policy-related internship with an intensive one-week course. Fellows have opportunities for networking with people from around the world who are interested in global health issues. —SP

Doug Strong (left), director and CEO of U-M Hospitals and Health Centers, and James Woolliscroft (right), dean of the Medical School, are embarking on a new initiative to integrate administrative units in the Medical School with parallel units on the hospital side. In the short-term, that means preparing just one budget instead of two, and more staff collaboration. In the long-term, it means eliminating redundant procedures, cutting costs and working together to administer high-quality patient care, research and medical education as efficiently as possible.

Happy Anniversary, AΩA

U-M members of Alpha Omega Alpha, the world’s only honor medical society, celebrated their local chapter’s 100th anniversary at a dinner and symposium in March. Considered the “Phi Beta Kappa of medical schools,” AΩA is an international organization with more than 100,000 members. Since 1908, 2,212 students in the Medical School have been initiated into the honor society. —SP