Study anatomy with cards that keep the picture.

What anatomy asks of you

A single anatomy lecture can carry a hundred terms, most of them attached to a place on a figure: a branch, a foramen, an attachment. The fact you are asked for in the exam is rarely the name alone. It is the name at that position, or the structure that passes through it, or what happens when it is damaged.

The deck that fails is the list of names with no picture. It can be reviewed to perfection and still leave you unable to point at anything.

Image occlusion first

Cover the labels on the figure and each cover becomes a card. One label is asked at a time while the others stay hidden, so you cannot read the answer off its neighbour. Make them the day of the lecture, while you still remember which labels the lecturer spent time on. Those are the ones that get asked.

When Lovelydeck generates cards from an anatomy lecture, a slide that is only a figure has no sentence to quote, so it cannot become a text card. It is not reported as missed. It is set aside in the coverage list under diagrams, which is your cue to cover the labels yourself.

Text cards for relations

Everything that is not a label is a relation: what passes through, what innervates, what a lesion produces. Those want text cards. A basic card for "what passes through the carpal tunnel", a cloze card on the sentence that names the branches, a reversed card so you can go from function back to structure.

Generated cards carry the sentence they came from and the slide it is on, so a card about an innervation can be checked against the slide in seconds when it feels wrong.

The stopping rule

A hundred to a hundred and fifty cards for an anatomy lecture is normal, and three hundred for a dense histology lecture is not unusual. That is why the review budget matters more here than in any other subject. Decide how many reviews a day you can actually do, make cards up to that budget starting with what you would be asked, and stop.

A deck of eighty occlusion cards you review daily beats a deck of three hundred you abandon in week four.

A worked example

Take a 38-slide upper limb lecture as a scenario. Twenty-two slides are figures; sixteen carry text. Generation proposes cards from the sixteen, each citing its slide. The coverage list shows the twenty-two figure slides set aside as diagrams and, say, three text slides that produced nothing, by title. You cover the labels on the figures the lecturer dwelt on, add the text cards that ask what you would be asked, and skip the ones about the history of the terminology.