[Note - we have only seen a "demo" which consisted of a movie of the program being used]

SimNerve is designed to simulate a neurophysiology laboratory on the frog sciatic nerve. The first section is a series of video clips showing the nerve being dissected out of a frog. The main part of the program is a simulation of an neurophysiology rig used to do experiments on the sciatic nerve. The rig consists of: a two-channel oscilloscope with one channel showing the stimulus and the other showing the response measured from the nerve; a stimulator which generates square pulses that can vary in amplitude and delay between successive stimuli; a box containing the electrodes where the nerve is placed and students can adjust the positions of the electrodes relative to each other; two nerves which are supposed to have slightly different electrical properties; and finally a spool of thread which can be used to ligate the nerve. All of these instruments are shown as life-like instruments with the controls and labeling you would see on the actual equipment. Students can adjust the stimuli, electrode positions, and ligation as they wish to conduct a variety of experiments - the demo suggests that students may want to investigate the dependence of the action potential on the stimulus, refractory periods, conduction velocity, and several other properties of the nerve.

I have just seen a video of this program, but it looks like it should be quite nice, though limited to this one particular experiment. The instruments on the screen look convincingly real, as do the stimuli and action potential traces on the oscilloscope. There are enough parameters to manipulate that students should be able to do fairly sophisticated experiments if they wish, but the controls are kept simple enough that students should not have much trouble getting up and running. Assuming the full program lives up to the images in the demo, this would make a nice complement to wet neurophysiology labs, and could also be used as a replacement when the real lab was impractical.

Computer: Windows and Macintosh

Source: Medical Multimedia Systems

Cost: High