Towards a Low-Cost Monitor-Based Augmented Reality Training Platform for At-Home Ultrasound Skill Development

• DOI: 10.3390/jimaging8110305
• Publication Date: 2022-11-10T07:03:58Z
• Authors: Marine Y. Shao; Tamara Vagg; Matthias Seibold; Mitchell Doughty
• Keywords: 1707 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; 2208 Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics; R858-859.7; Article ; augmented reality ; cross-sectional anatomy ; medical ultrasound ; ultrasound education; 610 Medicine & health; QA75.5-76.95; 02 engineering and technology; 1704 Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design; augmented reality; medical ultrasound; ultrasound education; Article; ddc:; 3. Good health; Electronic computers. Computer science; Photography; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 2741 Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging; 10046 Balgrist University Hospital, Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Center; augmented reality; cross-sectional anatomy; medical ultrasound; ultrasound education; TR1-1050; cross-sectional anatomy

Ultrasound education traditionally involves theoretical and practical training on patients or on simulators; however, difficulty accessing training equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for home-based training systems. Due to the prohibitive cost of ultrasound probes, few medical students have access to the equipment required for at home training. Our proof of concept study focused on the development and assessment of the technical feasibility and training performance of an at-home training solution to teach the basics of interpreting and generating ultrasound data. The training solution relies on monitor-based augmented reality for displaying virtual content and requires only a marker printed on paper and a computer with webcam. With input webcam video, we performed body pose estimation to track the student’s limbs and used surface tracking of printed fiducials to track the position of a simulated ultrasound probe. The novelty of our work is in its combination of printed markers with marker-free body pose tracking. In a small user study, four ultrasound lecturers evaluated the training quality with a questionnaire and indicated the potential of our system. The strength of our method is that it allows students to learn the manipulation of an ultrasound probe through the simulated probe combined with the tracking system and to learn how to read ultrasounds in B-mode and Doppler mode.