Teaching the anatomical three-dimensional relation of the ECG: EduECG

Correct interpretation of the standard 12 lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the fundamental skills in medical practice.Since the medical curriculum allows limited educational hours for its teaching, which often does not exceed 2 hours, the adoption of innovative techniques to enhance the ECG educational landscape is required. EduECG represents a novel approach to teach the basics of ECG, offering direct anatomical insights into the cardiac activation and recovery processes associated with different cardiac diseases. The EduECG concept integrates cardiac anatomy with a vectorial representation of the electrical cardiac activity. The vectorcardiogram (VCG) provides the (dipole)direction of cardiac activation and recovery, and thus enables the relation to cardiac anatomy. The same VCG is also used to estimate the position of the average electrical activity as a moving (dipole) vector, the PathECG. The current version of EduECG contains four different clinical case types: normal ECG, acute coronary syndromes of different culprit vessels, bundle branch blocks, and several premature ventricular contractions.The combination of the ECG waveforms, VCG, PathECG, and cardiac anatomy provides a whole new educational platform to teach the electro-anatomical relation to the heart.With the first version of EduECG we aim to provide material for problem-based learning by visual representation of mechanisms underlying each pathology.