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Interactive Foot & Ankle (Windows Version) by Vishy Mahadevan, Robert Anderson, Lloyd Williams, Penny Renwick; Radiology editor - David W. Stoller; Additional Contributor - Richard Ferkel (1999): Programmers - Raymond Ko and Mike Porter
Published by Primal Pictures Ltd., 4th Floor Tennyson House, 159 Great Portland St, London W1W 5PA. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7637 1010. Fax: +44 (0) 20 7636 7776. Email: customerservice@primalpictures.com. Web: www.primalpictures.com and www.anatomy.tv
1 CD-ROM. ISBN: 1902470109. Price: £ 150.00, $ 250.00
[Also available in full Professional Set containing 6 CDs (1. Interactive Hand 2. Interactive Shoulder 3. Interactive Foot & Ankle, 4. Interactive Knee, 5. Interactive Hip and 6. Interactive Spine) for £ 400.00, $ 595.00]
System requirements:
PC: Win 95, 98, NT 4, 2000, Pentium, min 32 MB RAM; Mac: Min 20 MB RAM, 16 bit color, 604 processor upwards, Mac OS 7.1 or higher
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One of the best ways to learn anatomy is to see, touch and dissect. Unfortunately in modern times there is a dearth of dead bodies to dissect, and the students have had to take recourse more and more to models. However this gap has been admirably filled by Primal Pictures, which has come out with an excellent set of CDs. Browsing these CDs is like actually seeing, touching - even dissecting - that particular anatomical region. Last time, we saw "Interactive Spine". This time we are going to have a look at the "Interactive Foot and Ankle".
One of the interesting features of this CD is that you can take any bone apart and make it rotate to look at it through any angle. For instance, if you want to look at, say, navicular, or say, cuboid, all you have to do is to select this bone from a long list of choices, and click on the auto rotate button. The very first screen you will see after doing this, would be a complete articulate skeleton of the foot. After that, the chosen bone (navicular, or cuboid, or any other that you have chosen), will be seen to strip itself out of the framework. And then it will slowly rotate. You will be able to see it from every conceivable angle. It is just like handling an actual bone in your own hand. All contours, depressions, muscular markings etc are as clearly seen, as if they were on the real bone itself. It is perhaps even better than seeing the actual bone, because in the CD version, you can actually "magnify" the view to a large extent. I looked at the third metatarsal through the "lens button", and it appeared to me much larger than life.
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Another interesting aspect of this CD is the quiz section. I have always been interested in quizzes, and I firmly believe that one of the best ways to learn a subject is solving quizzes related to it. Here you can use the quiz section, not only to learn about foot and ankle, but also to test your knowledge that you acquired through this CD.
You can setup the quiz in three different ways - (i) question type (ii) difficulty and (iii) test me on. In the question type, you can choose four different formats (i)what (ii) where (iii) mixed and (iv)preset. In the difficulty type, you can choose easy and hard, and in the "test me on" type you can again choose from four different formats (i)Layers 1-5, (ii)Layers 6-12, (iii)Layers 13-17 and (iv)anything. Various permutations and combinations of these choices will allow you to choose any type of question. You can also choose the number of questions you want. For instance if you want ten questions in any given combination, you can direct the software to do that.
 ...I would heartily recommend it to all teachers and students of biomedical sciences. It would particularly be useful to anatomists, surgeons, Radiologists, chiropodists and most certainly orthopedists. Trauma and emergency surgeons would also find it very useful...
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Just to test the functionality of this CD on the above aspect, I set the question type at "where"; level of difficulty at "hard"; "test me on" at Layers 13-17; and number of questions at 5. And I was greeted with a number of questions on plantar fascia, infrapatellar branch of the saphenous nerve, anterior medial malleolar artery and so on. Almost all of them happened to be "visual" questions, in which something is asked in relation to a diagram. On the left side of the window is shown a diagram, and on the right is the question. And I am asked to locate the structure on the diagram (obviously because I chose the "where" type of questions). If I select the right structure, there is a pleasant clink of a bell and the software presents me with the next question. At the end, the total score I got is revealed.
When you start the CD, you are greeted with an opening screen with five tabs. These are named (i) Anatomy (ii) Contents (iii) MRI (iv) Quiz and (v) Test. Clicking on each tab will take you to the relevant section.
Anatomy tab is the one which allows you to look at each bone from various angles and the last two sections, namely quiz and test allow you to take tests. We have noted all these features above. Before rounding off this review, I would like to make a brief mention of the remaining two sections too - namely contents and MRI.
MRI tab would allow you to have a myriad MRI views from all possible vantage points. Quiz is one of the most interesting parts of this CD. This section enables you to test how much you have learnt from this CD.
All in all, a very useful CD. I would heartily recommend it to all teachers and students of biomedical sciences. It would particularly be useful to anatomists, surgeons, Radiologists, chiropodists and most certainly orthopedists. Trauma and emergency surgeons would also find it very useful.
Order Interactive Foot & Ankle from the Publishers by Clicking here
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-Anil Aggrawal
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