Real-Time Ultrasound Simulation for Medical Training and Standardized Patient Assessment

With the increasing role played by ultrasound in clinical diagnostics, ultrasound training in medical education has become more and more important. The clinical routine for ultrasound training is on real patients; therefore monitored and guided examinations involving medical students are quite time-constrained. Furthermore, standardized patients (SPs), who are increasingly used in medical school for teaching and assessing medical students, need to be augmented. These SPs are typically healthy individuals who can not accurately portray the variety of abnormalities that are needed for training especially when medical examinations involve instrument interactions. To augment SPs in a realistically effective way and also address the resourced time constraints for sonography training, a computerized ultrasound simulation is essential for medical education. In this dissertation, I investigate a real-time ultrasound simulation methodology based on a virtual 3-dimentional (3-D) mesh organ. This research has developed the simulation technology to augment SPs with synthetic ultrasound images. I present this methodology and its use in simulating echocardiography. This simulated echocardiogram displays the various oriented sonographs in real time according to the placement of a mock transducer without the need of an actual patient

Cognitive Foundations for Visual Analytics

In this report, we provide an overview of scientific/technical literature on information visualization and VA. Topics discussed include an update and overview of the extensive literature search conducted for this study, the nature and purpose of the field, major research thrusts, and scientific foundations. We review methodologies for evaluating and measuring the impact of VA technologies as well as taxonomies that have been proposed for various purposes to support the VA community. A cognitive science perspective underlies each of these discussions