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CAE Healthcare has sold its first transthoracic echocardiography simulator, CAE VIMEDIX to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

The simulator is designed to train healthcare professionals perform anatomical and physiological assessments of the heart using ultrasound. The simulator is a major breakthrough for medical training as it helps make echocardiography more accessible to healthcare practitioners who are not medical imaging specialists.

"The CAE VIMEDIX echocardiography simulator is unique and a fantastic training tool," said Dr Feroze Mahmood, Director of vascular anesthesia/perioperative echocardiography at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and member of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians. "Residents, fellows, physicians, nurses and other healthcare practitioners have access today to small and portable ultrasound machines that can save lives, however the accessibility to training to use those machines is creating a bottle-neck."

"We are thrilled that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is the launch customer of our CAE VIMEDIX simulator," said CAE Healthcare President Guillaume Hervé. "CAE has been one step ahead for more than 60 years in applying simulation technology innovation to enhance safety and efficiency in aviation. By making echocardiography more accessible through our end-to-end simulation-based solutions, we will be improving patient safety."

The cutting-edge, animated transthoracic echocardiography simulator allows healthcare professionals to derive highly realistic echo experience and training. It increases hand-eye coordination and probe handling while improving pathology recognition skills. The simulator links a custom-designed mannequin and transducer to a screen showing the ultrasound image and the corresponding animated, 3-D anatomical display of the heart. Learners can practice their pathology recognition skills starting with the simulation of simple cases and then advancing to more complex scenarios. The animated heart can be independently cut and rotated to study more thoroughly the cardiac anatomy.

The simulator was developed by VIMEDIX, one of the two companies CAE acquired earlier this year in order to expand its growing portfolio in ultrasound imaging education and training.

The underlying imaging market, which drives the need for realistic training, is experiencing rapid growth, particularly because of the proliferation of handheld and portable devices. Those units enable a larger population of healthcare practitioners to perform diagnostic procedures and evaluations, which historically could only be done by medical imaging specialists.

Source: CAE Healthcare

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