Minimally invasive therapy & allied technologies : MITAT : official journal of the Society for Minimally Invasive Therapy
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Minim Invasive Ther Allied Technol · Apr 2010
Efficiency of ultrasound training simulators: method for assessing image realism.
Although ultrasound has become an important imaging modality within several medical professions, the benefit of ultrasound depends to some degree on the skills of the person operating the probe and interpreting the image. For some applications, the possibility to educate operators in a clinical setting is limited, and the use of training simulators is considered an alternative approach for learning basic skills. ⋯ This article describes a method that allows corresponding true and simulated ultrasound images to be generated and displayed side by side in real time, thus facilitating an interactive evaluation of ultrasound simulators in terms of image resemblance, real-time characteristics and man-machine interaction. The proposed method could be used to study the realism of ultrasound simulators and how this realism affects the quality of training, as well as being a valuable tool in the development of simulation algorithms.