Freehand Ultrasound Demonstrations

This work was supported and supervised by the Medical Ethics Committee, School of Medicine, Wuhan University, Ethics Statement No. WHU2021-PMC002. The experiment was carried out at Wuhan University Hospital. The sonographer performed 5 examinations of the left kidney for each volunteer. A total of 24 volunteers (14 males and 10 females) participated in our experiment. To make the individual differences more typical, we not only considered sexes but also deliberately included people with different ages and BMIs. The BMIs of the volunteers ranged from 16.4 (underweight) to 26.7 (overweight), and their ages ranged from 19 to 67 years. In total, there are 53571 records of multimodal data in our dataset. The recording frequency is 10 Hz. A complete demonstration starts with the sonographer holding the probe holder vertically on the target part. After 3~5 seconds of coordinate alignment and gravity calibration, the sonographer begins to perform freehand ultrasound examinations. Each demonstration lasts 40~80 seconds. The ultrasound examination should cover the entire kidney. Meanwhile, the sonographer should make sure that the collected ultrasound images are as clear as possible with centered image content.