The virtual hospital: the digital library moves from dream to reality

Reinventing Radiology: Big Data and the Future of Medical Imaging

PURPOSE

Today, data surrounding most of our lives are collected and stored. Data scientists are beginning to explore applications that could harness this information and make sense of it.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

In this review, the topic of Big Data is explored, and applications in modern health care are considered.

RESULTS

Big Data is a concept that has evolved from the modern trend of "scientism." One of the primary goals of data scientists is to develop ways to discover new knowledge from the vast quantities of increasingly available information.

CONCLUSIONS

Current and future opportunities and challenges with respect to radiology are provided with emphasis on cardiothoracic imaging.

www.tnt-radiology.de: Teach and be taught radiology: implementation of a web-based training program based on user preferences as determined by survery

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES

To create a Web-based training program addressing the needs of a large, heterogeneous audience of users.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We defined our target group as consisting of medical professionals who teach radiology, or who, by their own perception, would benefit from improving their radiologic image interpretation skills. We interviewed 483 members of this group, eliciting their preferences with regard to layout, interactivity, contents, and other categories (11 in total). Considering majority preferences as recommendations and using the help of a special interest group of medical students, we assembled 500 teaching cases over a 1-year period into an interactive training program and made it available on the World Wide Web.

RESULTS

Important preferences expressed by majorities of interviewees were: high levels of interactivity, clear layout, intuitive usability, short page load times, permissibility of saving content locally, cost-free access, consideration of user input in the site development. To our knowledge, our web program TNT-Radiology, accessible at , is the first to implement all of these recommendations simultaneously.

CONCLUSIONS

We have created a Web-based program usable for teaching and learning radiologic image interpretation that meets the needs of a heterogeneous target audience to an unprecedented extent.

ELERA: a WWW application for evaluating and developing radiologic skills and knowledge

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES

To provide an online facility for evaluating, comparing, and building expertise in radiologic anatomy and clinical radiology.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Project participants were recruited from an experienced special interest group of students at the local medical school. A rigid protocol was agreed upon, defining and assigning the tasks of case selection, data entry, test task creation, and peer review. The presentation of test tasks and evaluation of user input was implemented as a custom web application.

RESULTS

ELERA, an online assessment and learning resource based on 1,650 pathologic cases and 550 anatomy cases, was created and made publicly accessible as a world wide web application.

CONCLUSION

The project design facilitated the creation of a free, highly accessible and user-friendly resource that offers capabilities for individual longitudinal and intersubject comparative assessment.

Solutions to challenges facing a university digital library and press

During the creation of a university digital library and press intended to serve as a medical reference and education tool for health care providers and their patients, six distinct and complex digital publishing challenges were encountered. Over nine years, through a multidisciplinary approach, solutions were devised to the challenges of digital content ownership, management, mirroring, translation, interactions with users, and archiving. The result is a unique, author-owned, internationally mirrored, university digital library and press that serves as an authoritative medical reference and education tool for users around the world. The purpose of this paper is to share the valuable digital publishing lessons learned and outline the challenges facing university digital libraries and presses.