A Web-Based Education System for Reading Video Capsule Endoscopy

The interpretive skills of medical doctors and medical technologists who examine video capsule endoscopy (VCE) in clinical practice are usually improved through hands-on courses. Such courses require that a large volume of cases be undertaken as part of the training, and they thus consume a considerable amount of the trainees' time. This paper describes an e-learning system that reduces the training time in addition to enhancing the quality of the educational process with regard to reading VCE. To achieve this goal, we focused on organizing training courses in order to appropriate for the laborious conditions that exist when reading VCE. The designed courses help the trainees acquire knowledge of abnormal regions and become familiar with reading VCE before taking examinations under conditions similar to those actual clinical practice. The proposed training modality was developed as an e-learning application on the World Wide Web. Thus, it can be easily extended to a wide range of trainees. In the experiments, 20 participants completed the self-learning training procedures in approximately 3 hours. The proposed system is much faster than conventional hands-on courses, which require a minimum of 8 hours. Furthermore, the trainees' learning performances in the final examinations confirmed that the proposed system is particularly effective for inexperienced examining doctors.