Towards a Virtual Echocardiographic Tutoring System

Towards a Virtual Echocardiographic Tutoring System
Gerd Reis, Bernd Lappé, Sascha Köhn, Christopher Weber, Martin Hering-Bertram, Hans Hagen
Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences

Abstract:
Three integral components to build a tutoring system for echocardiography are presented. A mathematical time-varying model for vessel-representations of the human heart, based on cubic B-Splines and wavelets facilitating the extraction of arbitrarily detailed anatomical boundaries. A dedicated ontology framework the model is embedded into enabling efficient (meta-)data management as well as the automatic generation of (e.g. pathologic) heart instances based on standardized cardiac findings. A simulator generating virtual ultrasound images from instances of the heart transformed into isotropic tissue representations.