Virtual Interactive Training System for Trauma
This research deals with the development of an inexpensive, interactive ultrasound training system (ultrasound simulator) for EMS personnel (emergency department physicians and first responders), with the goal of training them to use diagnostic ultrasound effectively and quickly. The value of training simulators is well-known, and this training system can make imaging services more widely available in pre-hospital and emergency care and for rural medicine, leading to earlier detection and more effective treatment. The system can be used at clinics, hospitals, teaching centers, even at a physician's home. Although the system is specifically developed for EMS personnel, the concept is fully applicable to any field of medicine that can benefit from diagnostic ultrasound. The work is carried out by Christian Banker, MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The value of simulators is fully accepted in the other professions, such as airline pilots, fighter pilots, and medical surgeons. People in these professions have demonstrated significant increase in their skills after undergoing simulation training. There is a similar, but unmet need for medical ultrasound imaging, which is the only interactive, real-time imaging modality in widespread clinical use. Thus, the Virtual Interactive Training System is designed to as closely as possible emulate the interactive, real-time imaging experience of ultrasound scanning.
The Virtual Interactive Training System utilizes a life-like dummy, or manikin, which needs to have the appearance, touch and feel of a given section of the normal human body, but otherwise can be hollow or filled with an arbitrary material. During the training session, a sham transducer with built-in tracking sensors is moved over the skin surface of the manikin, as in a real scanning situation. An ultrasound image of the anatomy, following the position and orientation of the transducer, is produced. The image may be normal or with trauma or pathologies, determined by the objectives of a given training session.
The images are based on a previously acquired, composite 3D image volume, which has been obtained by scanning a trauma patient and which represents the anatomy (and pathology) for the given training session. The system proposed here is PC based and it will use a touch screen to model a general user interface of an ultrasound scanner. The touch screen will allow performance evaluation, through touch identification of regions of concern or interest. Using H.264 compression (MPEG-4), we will establish a demo library of composite 3D image volumes that can be downloaded in compressed format effectively over the internet.
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