A psychiatry resident built a 27-chapter interactive EKG atlas

Robert Y. Chen@therealRYC

🚨 SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT🚨

Teaching EKGs in the era of AI

Since the launch of Opus 5.5, there have been really cool examples of motion FX explainers teaching topics both simple and complex. I was seriously astounded by how good AI has gotten at building out visually stunning tools to teach and disseminate knowledge. I feel like it's a 1000x-er in how we approach education.

As an experiment for myself I tried to build a similar interactive-explainer I had seen on X for the specific topic of teaching EKGs, the workhorse of peering into the electrical activity of the heart. The premise was to create tutorials with motion, rather than slide decks. Claude Opus 5.5 via the Claude Code harness was used to build something I would have actually wanted as an intern.

The Heart in Twelve Leads (Claude picked the name) is a 27-chapter interactive EKG atlas. Every tracing on the site is simulated from one 3D heart: an activation wave crosses the muscle, electrical currents sum to a heart vector based on biophysical principles, and each of the twelve leads records that vector and applies it to the model.

It starts with the basics: what are leads, and how do leads actually pick up electrical activity. It helps orient lead placement to rhythm strips so you can visually see the relationship between the two, something that always confused me in medical school.

The model can map pathology, such as bundle branch block, ischemia, alterations in electrolytes, and arrhythmias. It pairs lead readings with a dynamic model of the heart showing electrical movement down conduction paths, so you can map the raw electrical activity with what the EKG sees.

Each disease is a change to that same underlying biophysical model of the heart, so the leads stay consistent with each other and with the anatomy.

I was inspired by the incredible echocardiogram teaching site built by @David_Ouyang’s intro2echo lab (t.co/OoXhTJmQAI). His echo simulator made me want the ECG version (more relevant to what I have to think about in psychiatry). The goal is to actually sit inside the physiology instead of memorizing pattern lists. Huge shoutout for helping me think "bigger", which is still the bottleneck IMO in getting physicians to fully embrace AI.

This is a VERY VERY VERY preliminary site. I have not fact checked anything, and instead wanted to see the capacity of Claude to "one-shot" production. I had probably 10 prompts of steering/approvals, but ultimately I accepted everything with minimal amount of human intervention.

What we can do today as humans with the help of @claudeai or other frontier models is truly mesmerizing. If this is something you would want to build upon and bring to life, let me know!

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