Anatomia: An Interactive 3D Visualization Tool for Enhancing Medical Anatomy Education

Anatomy education continues to rely on cadaver dissection, which is constrained by donor shortages, costs, and limited hands-on access. Digital 3D anatomy tools offer alternatives, but most do not collaborate well across multiple users, keep upright content legible as viewers move around the table, or support hand gestures specific to anatomical interaction. This study presents Anatomia, a multi-touch tabletop application designed for around-the-table anatomy learning. It introduces a set of domain-specific hand gestures developed with medical students and instructors, a content-alignment mechanism that adjusts display orientation based on the user’s position around the table, and a software-level conflict resolver that allows two users to share a single display without additional hardware. Anatomia was evaluated with medical and non-medical students under a structured two-phase protocol. Results indicate that familiar touchscreen gestures succeed on first attempts, anatomically novel gestures are learned within a single guided session, content-alignment tasks score near the ceiling, and concurrent multi-user interactions achieve a perfect task success rate with no participant rejections. Together, the findings indicate that gesture-driven collaborative 3D anatomy visualization on commodity touchscreen hardware is a viable complement to traditional dissection, especially where specialized anatomy visualization tables are not affordable.

@article{Mudalige2026,
  title     = {Anatomia: An Interactive 3D Visualization Tool for Enhancing Medical Anatomy Education},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {9},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Iranga Mudalige and Hiruna Jayasuriya and Yeshan Gunawardane and Hashen Cooray and Imashi Dissanayake and Damitha Sandaruwan and Chamath Keppitiyagama and Mahappuge Shasika Eranda Karunadasa and Tony Mahadevan},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170990},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170990}
}