Abstract
Ultrasound imaging, one of the most widely used diagnostic modalities, anchors the fields of medicine, physics, and engineering. In university classrooms, however, ultrasound imaging is often taught passively with a lack of practical element as the clinical machines are not easily available and there are very few alternative teaching tools available on the market. As part of an undergraduate student project, we have developed a teaching toolkit featuring an inexpensive ultrasonic range finder to demonstrate the pulse-echo imaging process. The primary focus is the construction of equipment to enable known pedagogic principles (relating to active learning) to be applied to the subject area of ultrasound. Although operating at an acoustic frequency considerably lower than that employed clinically (and therefore achieving a much lower spatial resolution), the toolkit provides students with large observable effects while keeping cost to the minimum. Completed with an easy-to-use user interface and a set of carefully designed supplementary material (https://stacks.iop.org/EJP/42/055703/mmedia) including worksheets and lab technician guide, this toolkit aims to teach students the fundamental principles of ultrasound imaging via hands-on practice. We have designed it to be cheap, easy to set up, and portable. The effectiveness and impact of the toolkit were evaluated by ten undergraduate students who responded in the form of satisfaction questionnaires. To minimise the selection bias, we chose five students who had received no prior university-based instruction on ultrasound and five third-year biomedical engineering students who had learned about the topic previously. They demonstrated a strong interest in using the toolkit for a lab session and described it as user-friendly and highly engaging.
Highlights
IntroductionThe topic is a core component of most undergraduate biomedical engineering and medical physics curricula and provides an exemplar of how principles of physics and engineering can be applied to healthcare
As part of an undergraduate student project, we have developed a teaching toolkit featuring an inexpensive ultrasonic range finder to demonstrate the pulse-echo imaging process
Each student was introduced to the toolkit and the worksheets. They subsequently performed the four experiments before answering the questionnaire individually. Both the hardware and software were fully functional, and the toolkit clearly demonstrated that the travelling distance of the ultrasound pulse is twice the distance between the range finder and the reflecting surface, fulfiling the aim of activity 1
Summary
The topic is a core component of most undergraduate biomedical engineering and medical physics curricula and provides an exemplar of how principles of physics and engineering can be applied to healthcare It is a multidisciplinary area of which a solid understanding is expected to help students in any science-related discipline to appreciate a wide range of other core learning objectives (LOs) in higher education [2, 3]. It is usually taught passively by means of equations and picture, primarily because diagnostic ultrasound machines are often too bulky or expensive to be made available for classroom use. A beam of pulses is usually swept over 360 degrees to achieve ranging over a circular field [10]
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