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The term “Gray’s Anatomy” has become synonymous with the popular ABC show featuring surgeons who have ridiculous amounts of drama while somehow still finding time for the OR.  I’ve only seen one episode of the show, and would describe the main character as a black hole for drama, but anyways, before the show, “Gray’s Anatomy” was synonymous with gross anatomy, a very familiar text with medical students.  The full version of the Gray’s Anatomy text has now gone mobile and is ready to use on your iPhone.  There are a few versions of this app out, but I’ll be reviewing the Deluxe version.  In this review I’ll focus on how useful it might be for gross anatomy during the first year of medical school.

The Human Body 3D Anatomy App enables you to view different organ systems from a 3D perspective.  The app also offers an encyclopedia with some basic information about the organ systems.  It currently holds the #2 ranking in the paid medical apps section and costs $3.99.  This app has some of the same 3D features and graphics found in the 3D Brain app, which we recently reviewed.  Unlike the 3D Brain app that has detailed labeling of structures, this app’s largest shortcoming is the lack of labels on any of the structures present. I’ll mention more of these shortcomings in this full review.

The App, 3D Brain, has been out since October, but it’s location under the “education” category of the App Store allowed it to slip under our radar.  The 3D app is derived from the Genes to Cognition Online website, funded by the Dana Foundation and Hewlett Foundation.  Using the native iPhone gestures, the app allows you to zoom and rotate images of the brain in a three dimensional fashion.  In this post I’ll cover how this app can be used with your patients.

One of the biggest surprises in the App Store is the lack of legitimate USMLE study resources. I thought one of the biggest markets in would be medical education. There are a good number of Q-banks available for USMLE studying, but most can’t be accessed on the iPhone. Can you imagine if Kaplan or USMLE World had an app with their Q-banks? I would think this wouldn’t be hard to implement, and I know many people who would jump at the chance to have their personal Q-banks mobile.

Right now the four main players in the App Store are First Aid Q&A series, Lange Q bank, Dr. Conrad’s Disease Deck, and USMLE Wiz Flash Cards. We’ve reviewed the Lange Q bank(step 2 version) and Dr. Conrad’s Disease Deck. These apps will cost you 33 dollars and 20 dollars, respectively. But now you have the USMLE Buzz App crashing this sparse party. The app usually costs $2.99, but is currently on sale for 99 cents. It’s significantly cheaper than the other Q-banks and offers a different type of question answer format.  This review will cover the features of USMLE Buzz along with the best way to use it for USMLE step studying.

Get yourself a copy of Pocket Heart (iTunes price is $5.99) and you’ll immediately be impressed by this app. Yes, the graphics and animations will be what first grabs your attention, but you’ll soon find out in this review that Pocket Heart is truly a good learning tool for cardiac anatomy and physiology.

If one wanted to get an idea of the potential of the iPhone as a tool for bedside medical and surgical education, this application by Modality and Elsevier would be a good starting place to get inspired. While it seems obvious that a portable device with a great user interface, a sophisticated operating system and great multimedia features should be a shoe-in for portable medical education, what is equally true is that the critical ingredient remains great instructional content.

“Procedures Consult: Internal Medicine – Musculoskeletal” brings together a highly detailed review of orthopedic bedside procedures, such as aspiration of small and large joints, splint application and reduction of joint dislocations, with a well crafted user interface to create an application that will genuinely be useful for emergency room physicians and junior orthopedic residents.  This review will cover how this medical application for the iPhone and iPod Touch goes about teaching these procedures.

MacVideo has an excellent article on an imaging technology that is in the works for the iPhone. It’s called ViSUS and being developed by the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, now a hotbed for mobile imagining applications. They’ve also developed the ImageVis3D Mobile app and the now famous AnatomyLab App.

This improvement in technology should benefit radiologists the most. We’ve reviewed other mobile radiology app viewers, such as OsiriX, but this app promises to offer extremely high resolution imaging by streaming images from a server. A piece from the MacVideo article:

The iPhone has a screen resolution of 480 x 320 pixels. According to the university, the best of today’s high-definition TV sets has an image resolution of 1,080 x 1,920 pixels. But ViSUS can handle an image resolution of 200,000 by 200,000 pixels.

Streaming the images to the iPhone will let users see an entire image, at lower resolution, or zoom in to look at parts of the image, at higher resolution. The university says ViSUS handles the images faster, with less processing power, than other software, such as Google Earth.

Having this imaging quality in the palm of your hand will be tremendous for radiologists on the go.

The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah has a pretty interesting website as well. I’m eagerly awaiting to see the future medical imaging apps they will roll out with. Also, their ImageVis3D mobile app is free and fun to use, so make sure to check it out.

The medical app, Anatomy Lab, has been making some big news over the last few days. There have been a good number of blog posts and articles, and CNN.com even has a feature on the app! We actually reviewed the app awhile back in August. We knew back in August how special this app was, we’re happy to see the developers finally getting the praise they are due. Make sure to check out our past review of the app!

The CNN link. Our previous review of the app link.

Hint: We’re going to be giving out some free promo codes for a popular app soon, so be on the lookout! We’ll be busy over the next few days, so be lookout for the following types of apps: EKG app, another procedures app, USMLE study app, an App made for Interns, etc etc(not necessarily in that order).

Everyone in the medical field has heard the phrase, “See one, Do one, Teach one”. When you’re a budding medical student and intern, you’re taught to watch a procedure being done at least once, then to perform the procedure under supervision, and then after performing the procedure successfully, teach one.

The Procedures Consult:Internal Medicine App aims to help improve the success of this learning process. This $40 app packs 25 Internal Medicine procedures explained in detail through text, pictures, and videos. The app itself takes up a staggering 462 megabytes of space on your iPhone or iPod Touch. For that much space allocation one would think the app better be good. After using this app over the past week and seeing the responses from other medical students, interns, and residents, I can assure you, it’s better than good.  This app is going to be making our soon to be released Top 10 list of Medical Apps for Residents.  This is an extensive review of an app that is well deserving of the attention.

To our readers-

1) Just wanted everyone to know we’re working with the theiphoneappreview site to bring some of our older content to a bigger audience. They will be re-posting some of our older posts, if you click on over to their site you’ll see what I mean. We encourage our readers to check out their site for all your non-medically related app reviews/news. They have some great reviews and they periodically give away promo codes for apps on their site as well.

2) Tomorrow we’re coming out with our review of Modality’s Procedure Consult: Internal Medicine App (iTunes link). We’re really excited about the app and when I’ve let colleagues play around with it and they have had some interesting responses. It’s generating the same type of buzz that came with the Blausen Human Atlas App. Check back here tomorrow to see what the hype is all about.

3) The wrong batch of pictures got uploaded in our last review, for iAnatomy, the issue has been fixed. There is an explanation of the oversight mentioned as an addendum to the review. Thanks to our readers for catching that!

-iMedical Apps Team

While on the wards, everyone tells me reading CT images takes practice, practice, and more practice. Reading CT images is becoming crucial for gross anatomy as well, when I was a first year we definitely had to read cross sectional CT images for gross anatomy tests. This ability is put to practice on the wards early on. The look on med students faces when residents try to take them through an abnormal CT image can be absolutely comical.

When I’m being taught by residents and attendings, they always tell me in order to recognize underlying pathology, you need to first know what normal looks like. What structures should you be looking for at a particular vertebral level? What bones are surrounding certain vasculature in key areas? These are just a few of the questions I was hoping the iAnatomy app, developed by Dr. Anouk Stein, would help teach.