Software For Practical Training In Medical Biophysics

Abstract. The course of medical biophysics at our medical faculty consists of three parts. The first one and the most extended one is medical biophysics, the second one is introduction to medical data processing and the last one is biostatistics. Mainly the conventional forms of teaching are used – lectures, seminars and practical training. At present we have six practical trainings: Audiometry, Principle of computed tomography, Noninvasive measurement of electrical heart activity and blood pressure, Magnitude measurement of microscopic objects, Mechanical properties of Nitinol and Diagnostic use of ultrasound. To increase efficiency of the teaching process we have decided to combine and to apply all three parts of our course in every practical training. The base of all practical trainings is some medical or biophysical problem. Students must learn how to work with measuring device, they must collect data and they must process them and prepare final report. So we have decided to make the best account of personal computers, of software for data acquisition and statistical data processing and of local area network (LAN). For some tasks we use commercial software, when it was necessary we have developed our own one. For all practical trainings we use personal computers connected to LAN. Computers are provided for measuring with either AC/DC converters and sensors (Mechanical properties of Nitinol, Noninvasive measurement of electrical heart activity) or they communicate with measuring unit (audiometer, digital camera, ultrasonograph, spectrometer). We use some commercial software as DP Soft by Olympus for image processing and remote controlling of digital camera, MS Excel for statistical data processing or MS Word for creating final reports. Software for remote controlling of audiometer and database of patients was customized to be consistent with our special demands. For measuring of mechanical properties of Nitinol we have developed software for data acquisition by means of LabVIEW (National Instruments). We have developed also a number of teaching programs for biophysics (Construction of electrical heart axes, Propagation and reflection of ultrasound waves through interfaces between tissues, Blood circulation, Model of multithermocouple probe in the temperature gradient, Principle of osmosis, …) and for biostatistics (Theoretical models of random quantities, STATPROMED – interactive hypertext textbook of biostatistics). For developing of this software we use Authorware (Macromedia). Resulting practical tasks are very complex. Besides of investigating and cognition of basic biophysical phenomena and principles the students have possibility to learn and to train new modern ways of data acquisition and data processing. They also obtain experiences with various types of software and their effective exploitation.