Department of Pharmacology, University of California, Davis, 95616, USA.
Adv Physiol Educ. 2012 Dec;36(4):319-24. doi: 10.1152/advan.00029.2012.
The Einthoven triangle is central to the field of electrocardiography, but the concept of cardiac vectors is often a difficult notion for students to grasp. To illustrate this principle, we constructed a device that recreates the conditions of an ECG reading using a battery to simulate the electrical vector of the heart and three voltmeters for the main electrocardiographic leads. Requiring minimal construction with low cost, this device provides hands-on practice that enables students to rediscover the principles of the Einthoven triangle, namely, that the direction of the cardiac dipole can be predicted from the deflections in any two leads and that lead I + lead III = lead II independent of the position of heart's electrical vector. We built a total of 6 devices for classes of 30 students and tested them in the first-year Human Physiology course at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine. Combined with traditional demonstrations with ECG machines, this equipment demonstrated its ability to help medical students obtain a solid foundation of the basic principles of electrocardiography.
三角形是心电图学的核心，但心脏向量的概念对于学生来说往往难以理解。为了说明这一原理，我们构建了一个设备，使用电池模拟心脏的电向量，并使用三个伏特计模拟主要心电图导联，从而再现心电图读数的条件。该设备构造简单，成本低廉，为学生提供了实践操作的机会，使他们能够重新发现爱因托芬三角形的原理，即通过两个导联的偏转可以预测心脏偶极子的方向，并且无论心脏电向量的位置如何，导联 I + 导联 III = 导联 II。我们总共为 30 名学生的班级建造了 6 个设备，并在加利福尼亚大学戴维斯医学院的人体生理学课程中对其进行了测试。该设备与传统的心电图机演示相结合，证明了它能够帮助医学生获得心电图学基本原理的坚实基础。
