Forskningsdagene 2009 – an annual festival dedicated to research

2009-09-18
Workshop

The Research Days (Forskningsdagene) held in Bergen are an annual festival dedicated to research. During this event research and learning institutions of Bergen presented their activities to a broad audience including children and adults, laymen and experts.Β This year, the VisGroup together with their partners from HUS and CMR presented the newly started Illustrated Ultrasound (IllustraSound) project.

Ultrasound is a very important clinical imaging tool that is extensively used by medical doctors all around the world. For laymen, the ultrasound images are hard to understand. To increase the comprehensibility, we related ultrasound image to patient’s anatomy. We employed a web camera to capture the scene and magnetic tracking to capture the ultrasound sensor.Β We displayed ultrasound images captured by the ultrasound sensor in the contextual information from the web camera. Information from these two modalities were registered together and displayed on a widescreen TV.

The IllustraSound booth was a great success. Children and adults were waiting in line to see inside their bodies. Volunteers were scanned by an ultrasound scanner and the scans were mapped into the scene captured by a web camera. They could instantly observe their organs, such as liver, kidneys, veins, and even their heart beating.