The Experience of Teaching Students to Process and Interpret Tomography Images of Small Laboratory Animals

Purpose: To analyze the difficulties in teaching students to process and interpret the tomography images of laboratory animals, and to offer recommendations for the most effective teaching of this skill to students of various specialties. Material and methods: To analyze typical errors and difficulties, we interviewed the students and their supervisors and/or advisors; observed students while working with tomography images; analyzed the texts of students' theses and reports. To identify the habits of researchers with different education and work experience in processing and interpreting the images, we conducted interviews and/or on-the-job observation. Results: The difficulties revealed in the study largely depended on the student’s specialty. In particular, physicists, a chemist and a biotechnician had difficulties with learning the anatomy of the laboratory animal. All students except physicists had problems using computer programs with English-language interface. A physicist and a biotechnician showed haemophobia, which is never found among biologists, veterinarians and medical students. In the second phase, the features of image processing were studied in 15 researchers with different education and work experience. We identified the features that increase job performance (advantages) or decrease it (disadvantages). Conclusion: We offer recommendations for teaching students of various specialties how to work with tomography images of laboratory animals. The general principle is to rely on concepts that are familiar to the student. For physicists and biotechnicians, these are the physical processes of scanning in a particular modality. For biologists and veterinarians, it is the normal and pathological anatomy of the animal, and for medical students, it is the comparison of the human and animal body.