A smartphone-based simulator for transthoracic echocardiography

Development and educational rationale

Dr Mossa Banni, MRCPI Cardiology Registrar

After completing an introductory echocardiography course, I was encouraged to gain as much scanning practice as possible. Despite repeated efforts, I could not get regular access to an ultrasound machine for over a year. I looked for a way to keep practising probe movement and to understand how it produces each standard view, and found no freely available tool that did this.

EchoProbe is the resource I wished I had had during that time.

It is intended to make the early stages of echocardiography learning more accessible, particularly for trainees with limited scanning opportunities, and to complement — not replace — supervised practical training.