Development of Digital Fetal Heart Models with Virtual Ultrasound Function Based on Cardiovascular Casting and Computed Tomography Scan

Despite recent breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment, congenital heart defects (CHDs) continue to be the leading cause of death among newborns. Fetal echocardiography is the most effective and non-invasive method for the prenatal diagnosis of CHDs. However, the challenge of obtaining standard views can lead to a low diagnostic accuracy. To explore new methods for training, the combined use of cardiovascular casting, computed tomography (CT) scanning, and virtual ultrasound generation methods was studied to preserve the cardiac structures of a fetus in digital form. The feasibility of the proposed workflow was verified by testing three fetal heart specimens collected after the termination of pregnancy. As a result, the anatomical structures were imaged clearly by a CT scan after cardiovascular casting, and the virtually generated ultrasound images based on the use of the Public software Library for UltraSound imaging research (PLUS) toolkit successfully demonstrated both the standard views and the views with diagnostic values for the visualization of the cardiovascular structures. This solution provides great data extensibility while being simple and cost-effective for end users. Therefore, the proposed method could provide a promising educational system for trainees to understand standard views of fetal echocardiography and the corresponding anatomical correlations.