I wanted to thank Andras Lasso for his help during the development of an open-source ultrasound trainer (OSUT) for medical professionals learning ultrasound. The ultrasound trainer takes tracking data from many off-the-shelf hardware trackers and displays a virtual ultrasound transducer and 3D anatomical model at the exact location of the real ultrasound transducer in relation to the patient. We ran a randomized control trial on the device that showed it improved accuracy and speed of first year medical students learning ultrasound.
For registration of the 3D model to the patient, we applied a linear transform (Transforms → Create New Linear Transform) to the virtual ultrasound transducer. We would place the real ultrasound transducer over an area of interest on the patient (for example the heart) and adjust the linear transform so that the virtual ultrasound transducer was correctly placed on the 3D model. While this way of registering the 3D model to the live patient wasn’t perfect, it worked well in this initial application.
