Ves: Virtual Echocardiography System

The objective of the VES project is the research and development of innovative techniques and solutions for the achievement of a virtual examination environment in echocardiography. One crucial point is the development of realistic geometric models representing the diseased human heart. For this purpose we decided to use real echocardiography findings as a starting position. The modelling and visualisation of a human heart based on findings requires initially the elaboration of an ontological framework for echocardiography findings and heart-beat descriptions at the medical and at the geometrical level. In this paper we present our work on ontologies and how geometric models can be derived from them. We go on to explain how these techniques can be combined to achieve a virtual examination environment. In this way we show that VES serves as a case study for ontology based visualisation.