I was finally was able to compile and organize all the photos taken of the cat dissection.  The virtual cat dissection is simply a collection of pages that walk you through the dissection and point out various structures.  Photos are labeled to help supplement a real dissection done in a lab.  I did encounter some design issues with how to organize the pages.  Not all the cat structures fit into perfect categories, like the spleen.  I tried to organize the pages in the same way students walk through the cat dissection, so it wasn’t realistic to do only the digestive system and only the urinary system.  In the end, I decided to just focus on regions of the cat and the organs housed within them.

The whole process has been quite time consuming but I am happy with the results.   My photography skills can use improvements and a new camera this year has improved the quality of the photos.   In addition to the virtual cat dissection pages, the galleries  have all the pictures of the cat (even the bad ones).   I picked specific pictures for the virtual pages that most clearly illustrate the structure’s location and appearance.

Unfortunately, this year we had a shortage of male cats, and the two we had in the lab were neutered, which means I do not have proper images of the male cat reproductive system.  Hopefully, I will have better luck next year.

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Lastly, here are some of the specifics of how I made the pages and adjusted the images.

The photos were taken with a Nikon Coolpix S8100.  In most cases, I had the flash on auto after discovering that the flash wouldn’t normally go off with the lighting in the lab, and the photos would be too dark.   Even with the flash, shadows and contrast were sometimes not the greatest.  Turns out, these new cameras are great at faces and scenes, but they don’t seem to know how to deal with anatomy.  I also used the macro setting to get close-up images.

The pictures were then imported to the computer.  I used Google’s Picasa to adjust the lighting on many of the pictures.  Picasa is great at just auto adjustments, if you click the “I’m feeling lucky” button, often it fixes lighting and contrast problems with minimal work.  Picasa also allows for the exporting of photos with a watermark (the little anatomycorner.com) in the corner of all the pages.   The photos are also hosted on Picasa which allows me to just use their gallery widgets.  If you’ve had experience with WordPress, then you know that WordPress galleries are very clunky to use.  With Picasa, changes to my gallery  are easy and automatically reflected in the gallery at anatomycorner.com.

While I love Picasa’s features for some things, I noted that Picasa is not great with adding text and arrows.  Picnik can add text, but it’s really limiting with the arrows and text tools.  For adding arrows, I went to Sumopaint.com.   Sumopaint is an online image editor that has a ton of features, many of which I haven’t really used.

I’m still not completely settled on my image editor.  I know that Photoshop has way too many features that I won’t use to justify the price tag so I am in a constant state of looking for image editors.

Anatomy classes of   2010-2011 dissected a cat.  Throughout the year, I took photos of the dissection.  I have begun the process of cleaning up the photos, deleting and categorizing so that I can improve on the galleries of this site.

Right now, the galleries are categorized by the main theme, usually a body system, but in some cases it may be an activity students did in class, such as the blood type analysis.  The galleries are hosted on https://picasaweb.google.com/ to save on  bandwidth load.    All gallery links are located in the menu (to the left).

I know the images of the cat dissection can be disturbing to some.  Keep in mind, these are advanced students who have “earned” a spot in anatomy class by passing other science classes.  Most plan to go into a medical field.  The cats are obtained via animal control where they were euthanized due to overpopulation.   These cats are not killed for the sole purpose of dissection.

Dissections serve as a valuable tool for learning anatomy.  Students can use models and computers to simulate dissections, but in the end there is no substitute for a three dimensional animal model.   During the course of the year, students learn about the structures and functions, and also learn to treat specimens with respect.  Ethics are part of any anatomy class.

In the future, these students will probably be working on human specimens to learn anatomy and complete a degree in a related biological field.

Starting to put together this website, mainly following the same format as biologycorner.com. I did want to use new colors though to give this site a distinctive feel. Biologycorner only has limited human anatomy resources, buried in the classes pages. This site will be more general to serve as a resource for any teacher or student of anatomy.