UHN’s Technology Development and Commercialization office, with support from the Techna Institute, has licensed interactive modules for teaching transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) to a major Fortune 500 vendor of medical technology and services. These modules will be incorporated into the company’s internal e-Learning training materials.
TEE is a procedure for obtaining images of the heart by placing an ultrasound probe in the throat of a patient. This unique placement gives the physician a clearer view of the heart than when obtaining an ultrasound from outside of the chest. However it can be difficult to translate the two-dimensional image from a different perspective into the three-dimensional reality of the heart. The interactive TEE teaching modules were developed to help train post-graduate medical students in the interpretation and visualization of images, to relate the geometry of the TEE views back to the anatomy of the heart.
The TEE modules were developed by the Perioperative Interactive Education (PIE) team, a multidisciplinary group of biomedical multimedia developers supported by clinicians, in the Department of Anesthesia and Pain Management at Toronto General Hospital. The modules are available on the PIE Web site and are currently being viewed by about 600 people per day from 500 hospitals and 650 universities in 120 countries around the world. The project is managed by the Techna institute.