Passion for Passing on Knowledge

Educating is rarely the most lucrative way for a physician to spend their time. Sebastian Cotofana, MD, PhD, knew this when he launched his online educational platform, Cotofana Anatomy. Some things are more important than money, however.

“I would really like to leave an imprint when it comes to anatomical education,” Dr. Cotofana said. “When expert injectors look back on their careers, I would like for them to say, ‘Cotofana Anatomy is where I got my anatomy education from because it is a reliable, evidence-based source and I can always trust that what I learn on this portal is backed up by research and based on foundations of basic science.’ This is something that I would like to be remembered as.”

Cotofana Anatomy features video courses at three levels: novice, competent, and expert. Most courses focus on a specific part of the face, such as the mentalis muscle or the lateral canthal lines. Monthly and yearly subscriptions are available, as well as corporate packages.

“If you need to learn about a particular aspect of anatomy for a procedure tomorrow, you can find that procedure and learn about the anatomy,” said Dr. Cotofana, a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Vanderbilt University whose CV includes more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and online communications. “We have videos that show just the anatomy, and then we have videos in which we mimic and simulate procedures.”

When Dr. Cotofana and his wife, Mikaela, launched the platform, he estimates that he was spending approximately 20% of his professional time on it, with 50% of his time spent on research and 30% traveling internationally to conferences. Five years later, however, he says he spends closer to 70% of his time on Cotofana Anatomy with 20% dedicated to travels and 10% to research.

“Creating one 10-minute video,” he said, “requires a dissection time of approximately 2 hours, a recording time of approximately 30 minutes, and an editing time of around 5 hours. So, it can take 7 to 10 hours to generate one video. It is constant work, but I am driven by my passion for teaching and for improving clinical practice.”

The platform was born based on demand. Throughout the course of his travels, Dr. Cotofana frequently heard, “I wish I could go back to the anatomy lab” and “I wish I had you as an anatomy professor.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in-person courses ground to a halt, Dr. Cotofana decided it was time to create a new resource for clinicians.

“When you are in medical school, you just want to pass the exams; you want to get through the anatomy course and then move on,” he said. “Later, when you face the clinical field, you might need a deeper anatomical understanding, and the question is where to get a proper anatomical education. You can go back to the books or you can read some complicated scientific articles, but this will not fulfill all of your needs. The structure that we provide gives the learner an educational pathway. You start with the novice courses for the basics, and then you move on after novice to competent and then to expert. Through these three levels, you cater the anatomic knowledge to the clinical needs. A regular anatomy curriculum teaches about all of the muscles and nerves in the human body, but you don’t need that. You need specific knowledge for each procedure.”

Cotofana Anatomy has customers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and beyond, but Dr. Cotofana continues to fine-tune the platform. Recently, he implemented a subscription model that includes a yearly option for $79/month.

“We significantly changed our price structure because we want to be available for everyone,” he said. “We do not want to be this elitist webpage where you have to pay a huge amount to obtain this very specialized knowledge. No, we want to be available for everyone. If someone starts in the aesthetic field or even in the surgical field or any other medical field, and they want to learn about facial anatomy, we would like to be the go-to area because we are accessible, we are affordable, and we provide a great curriculum for everyone who wants to embark on this educational journey.”

While educational options in the United States are plentiful, Dr. Cotofana said he would like to see more regulation, and he hopes more structured platforms like his can be part of that.

“In the US, everybody can inject, regardless of credentials; there is no educational pathway or structure, and this allows the private sector to take a lead in the aesthetic education,” he said. “It’s a little bit like the Wild West of medicine in this way. What I would wish for the future is that there should be some regulation and some requirements to be classified as a competent injector or an expert injector. The adverse events that we can see from patient aesthetic procedures are fairly substantial. People can lose their eyesight. These are real cases, and it happens because of the education of the injector. The better the education is, the better protected the patients are and the better the patient care is. However, for the injector to be educated, anatomical knowledge needs to be affordable, available, and accessible for everyone.”

Rapid developments in the field of regenerative medicine have amplified that need for anatomy education.

“The more complicated the treatment and the better the treatment is, the better your anatomical knowledge needs to be,” Dr. Cotofana said. “It’s like a symbiotic growth between the industry and the basic science. With some treatments, we can see the effects, but we do not fully understand why they work the way they do. Only when anatomy really digs deep can treatments be understood and true advancements be made. Once you understand one very complex component of anatomy and develop a new treatment algorithm that works, suddenly a new treatment comes, and then anatomy has to adjust, and industry has to adjust. It’s a really a symbiotic growth, and this is why anatomy is a really good companion for the aesthetic field.”

Keeping up can be challenging, but Dr. Cotofana has drawn inspiration from those who came before him, and he is continuing the tradition of leaders in the profession giving back.

“So many in this field take previous time away from their family to educate their colleagues,” he said. “They don’t have to do that. They can remain in the office and they can continue making money with their daily clinical business, but they choose to take away time away and to share the knowledge. Everybody who does that has to be applauded and congratulated because it’s about sharing in this field and growing together.”