What I liked about these applications:

It’s nice Modality offers you four different choices of anatomy apps for the iPhone that use the same user interface.  This makes switching between apps easy and it allows users to pick what works best for them. Here’s a quick list of the features that go beyond what you’d expect from the typical navigation in each individual “card”:

  • The best feature is the ability to “Add Structure” to a card. That means you can include a new custom pin to label anatomy your own way, or you could use this pin to include a short mnemonic to help with memorization.
  • For each structure there are links to Google and Wikipedia, allowing a quick way to search more info
  • When using the zoom feature, image quality remains the same, and screen resolution is preserved.  Again, this feature should work fantastically on the iPad.
  • Simple yet effective quiz mode on each card that asks you to find the structure in question.
  • There is a decent search function on the main screen of the apps allowing you to directly find anatomic structures of the body.

What I didn’t like about these applications:

  • You are not given the ability to add your own extensive notes to a whole card, or even to a given structure.
  • Once you’re viewing a particular card/image you can no longer see the title of the card.  If you’ve forgotten what you’re looking at, you can’t easily check it again.  Instead, you have to click back to the menu to see the title and then click back into the card again.

What I would like to see in future updates:

  • Ability to add custom notes on each separate card
  • Ability to view the card title from within the card
  • Landscape mode
  • More advanced quiz features (overall quiz for all cards, random selection, % correct)

These anatomy apps would be good for the following:

Students will benefit the most from these Anatomy Flashcard apps. This includes medical students, but really all health professionals who need to learn anatomy (physician assistants, nurse practitioners, etc). The apps are also useful health care providers in general who need a quick anatomy refresher every once in a while or a good anatomy reference in your pocket.

Patient education, especially on the iPad

Another key function of these app would be for patient education.  Orthopedic surgeons or even family medicine doctors could show their patients the exactly anatomy of their pathologies.  These anatomy applications will also work on the soon to be released iPad, and showing patients these images on a beautiful display could improve their understand and also make their office visit more exciting.  These types of interaction could improve the overall patient physician relationship.

Conclusion:

The Modality Anatomy Flashcard apps are well designed and work well too. They are a good replacement for paper-based flashcards by the respective authors. The plus is that they are more mobile than paper-based cards; the minus is that you can’t share them with others easily (or sell them used when you’re done!).

Ultimately you really just need to pick the one app you like most and stick with it – use the brief descriptions at the beginning of this review to help you out, or take a look at the hard cover books/flashcard equivalents online or in a bookstore before you make the plunge and purchase one of the apps on iTunes. I personally might just hold on to two of them: Netter’s because I’m partial to his illustrations, and Rohen’s because I like the cadaver images used. But really I probably like these two most because they are the ones we used at my school.

Links:

Clemente’s Anatomy Flash Cards: Modality, iTunes, Publisher Website

Rohen’s Photographic Anatomy Flash Cards: Modality, iTunes, Publisher Website

Moore’s Clinical Anatomy Flash Cards: Modality, iTunes, Publisher Website

Iltifat Husain contributed to the writing of this post