With her skill as a sonographer, Toyake Crawley quickly found several masses in the breast as she scanned over it.

"This is a beautiful machine," said Crawley, who was testing her skills at Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center's Medical Simulation Training Center.

Some of the masses were likely benign cysts; others looked more dangerous, she said.

Hospital officials held an open house last month for the simulation lab.

"All of this is new," said Col. Karla Hansen, the hospital's medical education director. "The whole idea was birthed about a year ago."

The simulation lab features a variety of computers and prosthetic body parts to simulate almost every type of medical situation from stitching wounds to delivering babies to performing a colonoscopy.

Although they aren't real patients, they are extremely life like. The skin coverings feel very similar to human skin, not hard plastic or rubbery.

The showcased piece in the lab is the sim man, a full-bodied mannequin which can react to any and every situation, according to Hansen.

Sim man's computer brain can cause him to experience any medical emergency such as cardiac arrest and shock. He is very lifelike; he has a pulse and breathes.

"He will talk and groan," she said.

The lab is housed in two rooms on the hospital's seventh floor and is designed as a reinforcer to the skills residents are learning and refining.

"An emergency situation can be performed in a safe environment," she said.

A certain scenario can be performed over and over again, and in the case of the sim man, complications can arise just as they might in a real situation.