Donor Medical Record

UCI School of Medicine · M1 Gross Anatomy

You are your donor's last care providers.

Every donor in the anatomy lab arrived with a history. Operations, implants, old injuries, the conditions they lived with. The Donor Medical Record gives each student group an electronic health record and a real CT. They read the scan, write down what they find, and hand it to the group that comes next.

I'm a student →I'm faculty

  • 15donors in the 2026 / 2027 cohort
  • ~1,700CT slices per donor, at 1 mm
  • 3planes: axial, coronal, sagittal
  • ~10dissections, each documented

Scroll to descend the CT stack

Loading the stack…

CT: Colorectal-Liver-Metastases (CRLM-CT-1026), The Cancer Imaging Archive, CC BY 4.0. Not donor imaging.

Before the first incision

A dissection starts on the scan.

Every donor arrives with a full CT, roughly skull to knees, about 1,700 slices at one millimetre. The service reads the region while it is still intact.

Start here

I'm a student in the course

Signing in, finding your donor, reading the CT, filing findings on the exam map. Eight short guide pages, plus an interactive tour you can click through before your first lab.

Open the student guide →

The case

I'm faculty or a course director

What this changes about the anatomy course, what it asks of you, and how student use of AI is bounded.

Read the case →

What the course gives you

Two things, on the first day. A CT of your donor, and a chart with almost nothing in it yet. They are what you work with for the rest of the year.

The scan is a real diagnostic CT, about 1,700 slices at roughly 1 mm, stripped of anything identifying before it was loaded and keyed to a cohort slot rather than to a person. You can look along any of the three axes at full resolution.

Reconstructing…

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One acquisition, integrated along the view direction.

CT: Colorectal-Liver-Metastases (CRLM-CT-1026), The Cancer Imaging Archive, CC BY 4.0. Not donor imaging. The real donor studies are longer and stay behind the login.

The chart starts as the intake survey, filled in once per donor before any dissection begins: height and weight, the donor's general condition, deformities, scars and tattoos and what they suggest, fresh incisions, and cause of death where it is known. Everything after that is written by the students. Each session adds what it found, signed and dated, so the chart fills in the order the body is opened. By spring it holds a year of findings on one donor, each with a name and a date on it.

What actually changes

Gross anatomy is usually taught as identification. Find the structure, name it, move on. The donor is treated as a specimen. What the donor lived through is either invisible or treated as an interruption, whether that is a sternotomy scar, hardware in the femur, or a mass nobody mentioned.

Here it is the curriculum. You sign in, open your donor from the Patient Finder, and work that session's three tasks: label structures on the CT (in development), complete the GAPP (Detton's Gross Anatomy Practical Primer), record observations and findings. The same three, every session.

What gets recorded is filed to a region on the exam map, signed and attributed and readable by everyone else assigned to the donor. Across the year those findings accumulate into a longitudinal record of one person.

Students learn the same anatomy, while doing the thing the anatomy is for.

Built on the real tools

The record is OpenEMR, an open-source electronic health record, and the imaging archive is Orthanc, a server for DICOM, the standard format a scanner writes. Students scroll a diagnostic-quality CT in a real DICOM viewer and chart into a real EHR.

Those parts are not friction to be designed away. They are most of what makes it a record. More on the design →