The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic from 2019 is a serious global health threat and have dramatically changed our life style. As one of the numerous changes in our society, most of educational institutions have moved to the online lectures to prevent spreading infections of the COVID-19 since the first semester in the last year. In natural, we have also conducted online lectures by using video distributions followed this worldwide movements. In anatomical educations in our department of physical therapy, we have believed that understanding the variety of structural characteristics of specimens through the scientifically observing and accurately sketching the actual objects is crucial since earlier. Therefore, devised online lecture considering this point, i.e., online anatomical practice, were given in our curriculum. Additionally, to evaluate and promote student's progressions and motivations without conventional face to face communications, we have also been needed to compose all of the online lectures involving the mutual interactions online or otherwise between the students and us. In this article, we introduce that our specific actual strategy for the online lectures and our feelings after finishing whole schedule, to share our experiences obtained from this severe task with many colleagues annoyed by this COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the influence of the expansion of COVID-19 in 2020, it was urgently necessary to consider how to conduct the systematic anatomy training that is held from the middle of May every year at the University of Tsukuba. For medical students, anatomy training is an important opportunity to learn the structure of the human body and change their mind from university students to medical workers. Considering the importance of systematic anatomy in the medical education curriculum of our university, we tried to perform the training in a form as close as possible to the usual year. In this paper, we introduce the efforts of the University of Tsukuba for anatomy education in 2020.

In 2020, affected by the spread of COVID-19, many educational institutions were required to review infectious disease control and their educational curriculum. At the Hakujuji Nursing school, it was necessary to consider and take measures on how to perform the lectures and the clinical training that are held from April every year. Anatomical physiology is an important subject for nursing students to comprehensively study the function and structure of the human body immediately after enrollment. In consideration of infection control and educational effects, we adopted an on-demand distribution method by lecturers. In this report, we introduce the efforts of the Hakujuji Nursing School for anatomical physiology education in 2020.

Evaluation of human muscle hardness is useful for improving muscle condition and avoiding injuries. Recently, it has become possible to evaluate human muscle hardness with ultrasound elastography (shear wave or strain). However, its reliability has not been fully established, for some muscles involved in shoulder injuries like infraspinatus and teres minor muscles. In the present study, we investigated both relative and absolute reliability of ultrasound strain elastography (ultrasound real-time tissue elastography) for measuring hardness of infraspinatus and teres minor muscles using 21 shoulders of 11 healthy volunteers having no history of shoulder pain. To obtain the intraobserver reliability, the measurement of muscle hardness was repeated five times at each condition for each muscle. To examine the change in muscle hardness induced by changing the position, the muscle hardness was measured at two different positions, 30 degree and 90 degree of shoulder horizontal flexion angle. The muscle hardness was defined as the strain ratio of a region of interest in the muscle tissue to a reference material (acoustic coupler). A higher strain ratio indicates grater muscle hardness. Relative reliability was assessed using an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC(1,3)). Absolute reliability was assessed using the standard error of the measurement (SEM) and the sensitivity of the measurement to true changes was assessed using the minimal detectable change (MDC95). The strain ratio calculated for each muscle at each angle was found to have high intraobserver reliability (ICC range 0.89-0.98, SEM range 0.03-0.08, MDC95 range 0.09-0.23). The strain ratio of both infraspinatus and teres minor muscles was significantly higher at 90 degree than at 30 degree of flexion angle. From these results, we conclude that ultrasound real-time tissue elastography is useful for evaluating the condition of infraspinatus and teres minor muscles.