Internet Resources for Education in Radiology

The Internet has changed the practice of medicine in many ways, from enabling telemedicine to making the scientific literature easily accessible and searchable. Medical education also has changed and benefited a great deal from the Internet. Lectures, tutorials, and other educational materials readily available online to medical students, residents, and other physicians have increased the opportunities for self-study. Radiology, more than any other medical specialty, is extremely well suited to Webbased study. Just as a surgeon gains experience from performing surgery and an internist gains experience from caring for patients, a radiologist gains experience from examining many radiologic images. Although it is less helpful for teaching image-guided therapies, the Web lends itself to self-study of visual materials and provides an easily accessible resource for gaining experience in radiologic interpretation. Sifting through the numerous radiologic Web sites for useful teaching tools, however, may require more time than a student or resident can spend. Many sites must be explored to find useful teaching material, because the quality of online educational resources is uneven. A student or resident interested in radiologic self-study may be deterred by these obstacles. We therefore have identified and reviewed a number of Web sites offering useful materials, listing them in three categories: those offering teaching files (Table 1), those offering tutorials (Table 2), and those sponsored by radiologic organizations offering a variety of educational resources (Table 3). Our purpose is to provide an easily accessible and understandable reference for residents and medical students who wish to explore Web-based self-study in radiology. The information outlined here should allow students to spend more time learning rather than surfing the Internet. These site listings are snapshots in time. Web resources are truly moving targets. Soon after one describes the current status of resources on the Web, that status may change. Therefore, there is no possible guarantee of the future accuracy of these sites. The future likely holds more resources, perhaps of even higher quality. One major asset of Web-based resources, however, is that they are available anywhere and at any time. These resources can also provide outreach to practitioners in underdeveloped countries who may be unable to afford printed materials or travel to continuing medical education courses. In addition, these resources can be updated according to current practice and are not bound by a printing date. It is an ongoing challenge to keep abreast of the availability of current and new Web sites. Sites were reviewed for this article from the perspective of a 1st-year radiology resident or 4th-year medical student. The comments are meant to help users find sites that best fit their needs. Program directors are encouraged to bookmark useful sites on resident workstations, making the gateway available to any resident or medical student with a spare minute to find a site and learn. These resources can be incorporated into picture archiving and communication system workstations of the future, so that when the queue of pending cases is exhausted and e-mails are answered, a few cases or a structured teaching session can occupy the available minutes until more cases are ready. The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has an extensive portal page for radiology education. We used this portal and popular Web search engines (eg, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Excite) to compile a large list of sites to explore. The search terms that consistently produced the best results were “radiology” and “teaching.” Two types of education pages were sought: teaching files, to allow practice in radiographic diagnosis, and Webbased tutorials, to provide a more basic education in radiology. The teaching file Web sites were assessed according to several criteria, including the number of files, the ability to view the cases as both known and unknown diagnoses, the depth of case discussion, image quality, the Acad Radiol 2003; 10(suppl 1):S81–S86