Implementation of an Ultrasound Simulator Using Apple Pencil

Abstract

Ultrasound has been widely used in clinical diagnosis However ultrasound diagnosis is a highly user-dependent modality It requires lots of experience Recently the ultrasound image simulator has been developed to standardized training procedure in hospital and medical school As operator moves the ultrasound probe on the manikin simulator provides virtual corresponding images as the users were examining in a real environment allowing users to improve their skill before clinical diagnosis The quality of training depends on the accuracy of tracking device Because a high sensitivity sensing provides a higher performance for hand-eye coordination training Nowadays several commercial ultrasound simulators are available based on different sensor such as electromagnetic optical and inertial sensing In present study Apple Pencil is used for developing a tablet-base ultrasound simulator Two built-in tilt sensors will tell the tilt angles and azimuth of the penholder when the Apple Pencil is touching the surface of the tablet This feature is made use to track the moving action of the participants The information of tracking parameters are packetized and transmitted to a server for calculating the corresponding image The data-base in the present simulator applied CT transform for more widely access to training data online The transform is based on simulation of reflection transmission and scattering of acoustic wave A liver CT image is used as example in the present simulator The simulator is able to precisely show the synthesized corresponding ultrasound image and hepatic artery can be recognized on the image with different scanning angles Keyword: Ultrasound simulator Apple Pencil CT transform

Date of Award	2017 Sept 4
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chih-Chung Huang (Supervisor)