Construction of educational color layer for echocardiography simulator

There is the educational color layer for CT2TEE, an online transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) simulator accessible at www.ct2tee.agh.edu.pl in the current paper presented. TEE is nowadays one of the most important diagnostic tools in cardiology. Because of the semi-invasive nature of this examination and complexity of heart structure the training process of learning TEE can be long and difficult, especially in patients with congenital heart disease. Therefore CT2TEE is constructed, the first online TEE simulator, described in detail in the previous publication. This paper contains an overview on echocardiographic simulators and the previously constructed CT2TEE simulator. A detailed description of the construction and operating principles of the Educational Color Layer (ECL), an additional feature of the CT2TEE simulator, is provided. ECL, being a color information storing and indexing platform, enables to mark various 3D heart structures and facilitates the process of learning TEE.