Abstract
Echography (ultrasonography) is indispensable equipment in every medical field but examination with echography greatly depends on the expertise and experience of an operator. Recently a tele-echography system, where a medical doctor obtains echograms of a remote patient to diagnose, has been proposed as an application of telemedicine by connecting between them using high-speed network and introducing a portable echography. However, it is difficult to obtain standard cross sections of heart if a person who handles the probe beside the patient is not skilled in echography. Thus we have developed a support system to acquire suitable echocardiograms for diagnosis independently by extracting the shape of left ventricular wall into an ellipse in real-time and measuring the position of the probe. As the result of evaluation experiments, we have confirmed the possibility for an assistant system in tele-echography.
