The Department of Neurosurgery is hosting a 2-week course teaching Advanced Anatomy of the Head and Neck. The course is offered to all 4^th year medical students at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Led by Dr. Charles Prestigiacomo, Professor of Neurosurgery, the students learn the anatomy of the head and spine. “It prepares you for truly understanding the surgical corridors that are safe, effective and highly useful in taking care of diseases of the head, neck and spine,” Dr. Prestigiacomo says. Professors in the Departments of Neurosurgery, Otolaryngology, Ophthalmology and Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery each present their areas of expertise to the students. It’s a format that Dr. Presigiacomo has been conceiving since he was a 4^th year medical student. “As a medical student, I always felt that gross anatomy was wasted on the 1^st year medical students.” He thought it would be more meaningful to teach in-depth lessons to 4^th year students, and he promised himself that if he ever had the opportunity to put together this course, he would. “Before they go out there as interns, they will have a much higher level of understanding of the anatomy in a way that their colleagues never had at this stage.”

That’s exactly why Abhijith Matur, a 4^th year medical student hoping to match in neurosurgery, signed up for the course, “As a first year, you don’t really know what to do with the information you’re learning and you don’t know why it is important.” He says after spending time in the operating room and visiting various rotations, revisiting the anatomy with a new perspective will be very helpful.

Once students learn the anatomy in the classroom, they then go to the Goodyear Microsurgery Lab where they are able to see the anatomy first-hand on cadaveric specimens. The surgeons work alongside the medical students to show them exactly what they are seeing.

Sam Beydoun is planning to match in ENT; he signed up for the course because students who took it last year recommended, “The chance to work with attendings, one-on-one in a more intimate setting was a big factor in why I wanted to take this class.”

Dr. Prestigiacomo believes that the medical students who take this course will be a stepahead of their counterparts, “The cross-fertilization of information that occurs here because I have experts from each field talking about the relational anatomy that they see day in and day out,” explains Dr. Prestigiacomo, “there is not one resident in the country that can get that information in a two-week block this intense.”

The course will wrap up Friday, February 13. Dr. Prestigiacomo plans to host the course again next year.