Applications

Skills labs for medical and dental training

In teaching labs, students work with equipment whose image usually only one person sees — here that image is on every seat in the class.

Skills lab

What sets a skills lab apart from a seminar room

A skills lab is a practical training room in medical and dental education where students work on simulators, specimens or samples, and where the whole class follows the image produced under the camera, in the eyepiece or in the instructor's hands.

alphadidact® Digital distributes these images in hardware. Every workstation has a box, the boxes are cabled to one another, and through them the image from any source reaches any number of monitors. Nothing runs on the workstation computers: no service, no driver, no traffic on the hospital or campus network.

The signal carried is HDMI with audio, and it travels uncompressed. The image is neither encoded nor buffered, so no visible delay appears between a movement at the simulator and its display on the monitor. The sockets on the boxes are DVI-D and can be screwed down.

A star layout reaches up to 100 workstations via satellites, a ring up to 50 student positions. That covers a single classroom as readily as a laboratory wing whose positions are spread across several rooms.

Three kinds of lab

Where this technology sits in medical teaching

The three rooms differ in the equipment they take in, not in the transmission behind it.

Dentistry

Treatment simulation in class

At university dental clinics and dental faculties, students practise on phantom heads. The image from an intraoral camera or a microscope is on every simulation workstation while the instructor works at a single unit. Installations of this kind are built together with the manufacturers of the treatment units.

Anatomy

A clear view of the instructor's table

Microscopy

One eyepiece view for the whole class

Case studies

Teaching labs built this way

University dental clinics, medical faculties and other training institutions have equipped their classrooms in this way — the projects below show which devices were connected and how many positions each room holds.