The curriculum in teaching anatomy is under increasing pressure to transform from traditional to interdisciplinary integration, from cadaver-based to multimodal instruction with a system-based approach. Educational technologies are becoming critical and urged to be integrated into teaching medicine. At the College of Health Sciences, VinUniversity, the block of Human Body Structure and Function (HBSF) within the undergraduate medical training program was designed to teach anatomy with relevant basic medical sciences based on the principles of the system-based integrated structure. To support students in achieving the intended learning outcomes, multiple innovative technological platforms have been introduced into the curriculum using the moderation of the Adaptation – Standardization – Integration – Compliance (ASIC) framework over four key terms: adaptation, standardization, integration, and compliance. In this paper, the process for curriculum development is presented with an illustration of the selected technological platforms and the lessons learned using the ASIC model.

Code-switching (CS), which is when Vietnamese speech uses English words like drug names or procedures, is a common phenomenon in Vietnamese medical communication. This creates challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, especially in low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Current most ASR systems struggle to recognize correctly English medical terms within Vietnamese sentences, and no benchmark addresses this challenge. In this paper, we construct a 34-hour \textbf{Vi}etnamese \textbf{Med}ical \textbf{C}ode-\textbf{S}witching \textbf{S}peech dataset (ViMedCSS) containing 16,576 utterances. Each utterance includes at least one English medical term drawn from a curated bilingual lexicon covering five medical topics. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art ASR models and examine different specific fine-tuning strategies for improving medical term recognition to investigate the best approach to solve in the dataset. Experimental results show that Vietnamese-optimized models perform better on general segments, while multilingual pretraining helps capture English insertions. The combination of both approaches yields the best balance between overall and code-switched accuracy. This work provides the first benchmark for Vietnamese medical code-switching and offers insights into effective domain adaptation for low-resource, multilingual ASR systems.

Plastination is a superior method of preserving biological specimens for anatomy teaching and research. It offers durable and long-lasting specimens while keeping their natural appearances. This method works by replacing the water and lipids of the specimens with a volatile water-miscible solvent, followed by an exchange of the solvent with a curable prepolymer. This research aims to develop plastination methods that employ commercially available chemicals and instruments, yet could produce comparative results with lower costs to those of the Biodur® S10 method which is the gold standard technique in plastination. Generally, plastination consists of five steps, including fixation, dehydration, degreasing, forced impregnation, and curing. Twenty-nine (n = 29) chicken hearts were randomly assigned to six groups. The fresh hearts were fixed in 5% formalin at 4 °C for 6 days, washed with tap water for 18 hours, dehydrated in three baths of acetone at -25 °C for three days per bath, and degreased in acetone for 1 hour at room temperature (RT). The forced impregnation step was performed by immersing 6 groups of hearts in 6 prepolymer mixtures composed of methacrylates and thermal initiators at 4 °C while decreasing pressure from 760 mmHg to 5 mmHg over 2 days. The hearts were then thermally cured under Argon at RT for 1 day, and at 50 °C for 2 days. Two groups were successfully plastinated with minimal volume shrinkage. Their anatomical features, colors, surfaces, and physical durability were satisfactory. Our two newly developed prepolymer mixture, costing 0.27 USD to produce a plastinated chicken heart, is several-fold cheaper than the S10 technique which costs 0.63 USD to produce a plastinated chicken heart. Devised plastination procedures are currently under further development to plastinate larger specimens (porcine organs) which are more challenging to plastinate.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) ranks as the fifth most prevalent malignancy in Vietnam. Cytological and molecular assays currently serve as crucial tools for assessing the immune status of patients. Here we document extensive alterations in both the cellular immune system in CRC patients using state of the art multi-color flow cytometry and its products (cytokines). We report a significant reduction in B and T lymphocyte populations in CRC patients, coupled with relatively stable NK cell and monocyte levels. These changes may be considered broadly characteristic of the disease. More specifically, several B cell subpopulations were increased in CRC patients, including B_CD21low, B_transitional and B_class-switched cells. Similarly, CRC patients displayed greater proportions T cell activation markers, including T_CD69+, T_CD8+CD28- and T_CD8 effector and T_CD8 effector memory cells. Leukocytes from CRC patients also exhibited an upregulation of NK cell receptors (CD25, CD57, CD69, KLRG1, p44) and enhanced cytotoxic capability of NK cells. Five out of 15 cytokines were significantly elevated in CRC patients. This study provides a comprehensive profile of cellular immune markers and cytokines that may serve as immune biomarkers and treatment response monitoring in CRC patients. These findings contribute to our understanding of the new and coordinated immunological landscape in CRC and will inform future diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.