Purpose: Traditional undergraduate radiographer training mixes academic lectures and clinical practice. Our goal is to bridge the current disconnection between theory and practice in a safe environment, avoiding the risk of radiation for both practitioners and patients. To this end, this research proposes a new software to teach diagnostic radiography using real-time interactive X-ray simulation and patient positioning. Methods: The proposed medical simulator is composed of 3 main modules. A fast and accurate character animation technique is in charge of simulating the patient positioning phase and adapt their internal anatomy accordingly. gVirtualXRay is an open-source X-ray simulation library and generates the corresponding radiographs in real-time. Finally, the courseware allows going through all the diagnostic radiology steps from the patient positioning and the machine configuration to the final image enhancing. Results: A face and content validation study has been conducted. 18 radiology professionals were recruited to evaluate our software using a questionnaire. The results show that our tool is realistic in many ways (72% of the participants agreed that the simulations are visually realistic), useful (67%) and suitable (78%) for teaching X-ray radiography. Conclusions: The proposed tool allows simulating the most relevant steps of the projectional radiography procedure. The virtual patient posing system and X-ray simulation module execute atinteractive rates. These features enable the lectures to show their students the results of good and bad practices in a classroom environment, avoiding radiation risk.

@Article\{SKGP22,
  author       = "Sujar, Aaron and Kelly, Graham and García-Lorenzo, Marcos J. and P. Vidal, Franck",
  title        = "Interactive teaching environment for diagnostic radiography",
  journal      = "International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery",
  number       = "1",
  volume       = "17",
  pages        = "85--95",
  month        = "jan",
  year         = "2022",
  note         = "DOI: 10.1007/s11548-021-02499-7",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2022/SKGP22"
}