Perioperative Interactive Education (PIE):
The Internet is becoming an increasingly important medium for medical education. In keeping with University Health Network (UHN)’s strategic plan to be a leading educator of health professionals, the PIE team is providing state-of-the-art interactive, online teaching aids for medical educators and trainees around the world.

What does PIE do?
The PIE program develops advanced, comprehensive and user friendly online educational modules that can be used by both medical educators in the classroom, and by trainees for self-study. These educational models fall into four categories: interactive 3D anatomic models, animations of physiology, patient simulations and virtual patients.

What is the PIE team?
The PIE team consists of medical illustrators and animators with Masters degrees in Biomedical Communications at University of Toronto. They work in collaboration with clinical experts at UHN who guide the development of the teaching modules.

Why are donations needed?
The PIE team has no ongoing financial support from UHN. The funding for PIE consists primarily of peer reviewed research grants, supplemented with support from industry and philanthropy. Philanthropy is essential to provide a “safety net” for the team when current peer-reviewed grants expire and new grants have not begun. This funding will ensure PIE developers can continue to build this unique, world-leading educational resource.

Who benefits from the donations?
All PIE educational modules are freely available on the Internet. There are currently 250,000 medical educators and trainees from 500 hospitals and 650 universities in over 80 countries visiting the PIE Web sites every year. This is growing at rate of about 50% each year. The PIE Web site provides valuable training resources for both developed and developing countries.

Comments from  medical educators and trainees:

Associate professor Anesthesiology, Univ. Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA
These sites are absolutely wonderful. Clear, concise, friendly, complete. I am teaching resident physicians how to perform intraoperative TEE exams as part of their cardiac anesthesia training, and your sites are great. Keep up the good work !!

Echocardiography Fellow, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA
This is probably THE best resource! Excellent job – this has helped me so much in my echo fellowship, and better than any textbook.

Echocardiography Fellow, University of Alberta, Canada
Amazing!!! just started doing an echo fellowship and we do tons of TEE, and I have to say that thanks to this excellent software, my life is amazingly easier, and now I can say I am starting to understand a little more!

Cardiologist, Fortis Malar Hospital, Chennai, India
I am a cardiologist from Chennai, India, and our hospital trains physicians and technologists from various African countries in advanced techniques of echocardiography. Your module is truly unique and we have found this very very useful. You may not realize how useful your website and teaching modules have been to other areas of the World!!

Cardiac Anesthesioligist, King Faisal Specialist Hospital, Saudi Arabia
You have created a truly fantastic website. Thank You.