Modes of information delivery in radiologic anatomy education: Impact on student performance.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: This study provides a systematic assessment of different methods of delivering radiologic teaching content (lecture, printed text, and digital content delivery) under standard conditions, enabling comparison of the effectiveness of these methods. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A printed atlas of sectional anatomy was used as a standard. Digital content was developed on the basis of the printed atlas. Lecturers used both the printed and the digital content to prepare lectures. Standardized teaching material thus created was presented to second-term undergraduate students who had attended the school's anatomy course, but had not received any radiology teaching. Multiple choice examinations were used to assess the students' ability to recognize anatomical structures in known as well as unknown images. In a survey, the students' subjective experience of the learning process was assessed. RESULTS: No difference was seen between the groups regarding examination results. Students preferred a combination of digital media and lectures by enthusiastic teachers. CONCLUSIONS: The shortage of teachers requires a compromise concerning the delivery of radiologic anatomy content in a medical school setting. Based on our results, we recommend a combined approach of lecture and digital content delivery.

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.