Medical Encyclopedia AskDrWiki Expands Collection of Videos and Images

AskDrWiki is a collaborative encyclopedia started by cardiology fellows at Cleveland Clinic which is expanding rapidly its scope of high quality free content. The project received a lot of coverage from both professional and mainstream media which had the desired effect of bringing more contributors. A wiki is only as good as its contributors and there is definitely a strength in numbers. In addition, the AskDrWiki founders have introduced a rigorous screening process to ensure that only qualified medical professionals can add and edit articles. My application was accepted and I am currently a member of the Editorial Board.

In the recent months, AskDrWiki has expanded its collection of free medical videos and images:

- Echocardiograms - 177
- Coronary Angiograms - 145
- Peripheral Angiograms - 26
- EKGs - 76

Physicians in training interested in cardiology may find the step-by-step video tutorials of Coronary Angiography and Ventriculography especially valuable.

In summary, AskDrWiki seems to be an exciting medical education project which brings good quality content online (for free) and I am happy to be a small part of it.

Ken Civello, Brian Jefferson and I have presented abstracts about using the wiki for different aspects of medical education at several local, national and international scientific meetings where the posters brought a lot of interest and lively discussion.

Acute Wiiitis Reported in NEJM

The preeminent medical journal NEJM published a case report by a resident physician who developed acute tendonitis due to playing too much with the new Nintendo video game console called Wii (pronounced "wee").

According to CNN:
"When Dr. Julio Bonis awoke one Sunday morning with a sore shoulder, he could not figure out what he had done. It felt like a sports injury, but he had been a bit of a couch potato lately. Then he remembered his new Wii..."

Wii remote (nicknamed "Wiimote") is a motion-sensitive controller and allows gamers to direct the on-screen video game by swinging it like a tennis racket. And this is how one gets wiiitis. Pure logic it is not. The Latin names of inflammatory conditions are made from the name of the affected organ and the suffix "-itis", for example tendonitis -- tendon inflammation, dermatitis -- skin (derma) inflammation. No matter how popular it is, Wii is not part of the human body (yet), and therefore creating names such as "nintendonitis" or "wiitis" should probably be avoided.

After BMJ published a study on didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, it seems like few things can surprise the readers of medical journals anymore. Life is truly stranger than fiction.


A didgeridoo. Click to hear the sound it makes.

Joshua Schwimmer of KidneyNotes maintains a collection of hilarious journal articles.

References:
Acute Wiiitis. NEJM, Volume 356:2431-2432, June 7, 2007.
If it's not tennis elbow, it may be 'Wiiitis'. CNN, 2007.
Image sources: Wikipedia, Enrique Dans, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License; Wikipedia, a GNU Free Documentation License.

Related:
Is the Superbowl Hazardous to Your Health? Once again, the New England Journal of Medicine has sunk to new lows in the interest of increasing its impact factor. Dr. Wes, 01/2008.

Updated: 01/31/2008

Journal of Thoracic Imaging Features Sumer's Radiology Blog

The Journal of Thoracic Imaging published a review on using blogs for radiology education. Summer Sethi of Sumer's Radiology Site is the author of the article:

Blog/Web Log-A New Easy and Interactive Website Building Tool for a Non-net Savvy Radiologist. Sethi, Sumer K. Journal of Thoracic Imaging. 22(2):115-119, May 2007.

"The success of this project can be measured by the fact that in the last full year of "rad-blogging," more than 30,000 visitors came to the site from all over the world."

Summer is also the founder and frequent host of the monthly Radiology Grand Rounds.

Our own projects, ClinicalCases.org and the blog, have had more than 500,000 visitors and 1,500,000 page views since 2005.

References:
One Million Page Views. Clinical Cases and Images - Blog, 2006.
Image source: Wikipedia, public domain.

A Presentation on Web 2.0 in Health Care by John Sharp

John Sharp's name suits him. He has a sharp intellect and an ability to see beyond the obvious in the crowded fields of Web 2.0 companies and medical informatics. His presentation on Web 2.0 in medicine is definitely worth-reading and much better than my own effort to review this rapidly changing subject in 2005 and 2006.

The talk was presented at the conference of Northern Ohio Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society in Cleveland and the PDF is available for download here:

Web 2.0: Beyond Open Source in Health Care ( 3.4 MB PDF)

John lists several medical blogs as examples of Web 2.0, including Kevin, M.D. (of course), Running a Hospital and Clinical Cases and Images - Blog.

He also mentions Second Life which may prove to be the next interesting thing for the tech-savvy health workers to explore after they master blogs, RSS, wikis and podcasts. I have my own theory about the 6 axes of medical education in Web 2.0 style:

1. Web feeds (RSS)
2. Podcasts
3. Blogs
4. Wikis
5. Custom search engines
6. Second Life virtual world

Robert Scoble links to a Social Media Starfish created by Darren Barefoot (a Creative Commons license).

References:
My Presentation on Web 2.0 in Healthcare to the Northern Ohio HIMSS. eHealth, John Sharp.
Medicine in Second Life. ScienceRoll.
How to Use Web 2.0 in Medicine?
10 Tips for How to Use Web 2.0 in Medicine. ScienceRoll.com, 2007.
Top 10: Virtual Medical Sites in Second Life! ScienceRoll.com, 06/2007.
Web 2.0 in Medicine Presentations by a University of Michigan Librarian
Image source: JohnSharp.com


My presentation on Web 2.0 in Medicine from December 2006.

Further reading:

Collaborative Presentation on Web 2.0. Link via Go2Web2.
Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English (Presentations). Digital Inspiration, 2009.
Social media in medical education - Grand Rounds presentation by IUH Med/Peds residency program director http://goo.gl/Zw3lK

Another Milestone: One and a Half Million Page Views for Clinical Cases and Images

I never expected this little project, which I started as a chief resident at Case Western Reserve University/St Vincent, to become so popular. Two years and 1.5 million page views later, I want to thank all readers for visiting ClinicalCases.org and CasesBlog.

At the rate of 100,000 page views per month, we will likely reach the nice round number of 2 million by the end of the year. Twenty-two medical schools link to the project but most of the visitors come from Google which ranks the the websites high for many clinical queries, including the number one and two search results for "clinical cases." CasesBlog and ClinicalCases.org have Google a page rank of 6 and 5 respectively. To put this in perspective, the official website of the Cleveland Clinic has a page rank of 7.

I hope our readers find the website useful. We have put a lot of effort and late-night work hours in an attempt to create a good quality content and share experiences which we regard as valuable. Personally, I find creating and maintaining the website gratifying. It feels like you have written a book and people read 3,000 pages of it, every day. Thank you for your interest in this project and I hope you find it useful for your medical education.

References:
One Million Page Views. CasesBlog, 2006.
Medical Schools Which Link to Our Project Clinical Cases and Images

Video: Highlights of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Interview

Jobs summarized the relationship between himself and Gates, quoting the Beatles: “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”

See the full set of videos on D5 All Things Digital.

Related:

“And one more thing” about Steve Jobs’ battle with cancer - Science-Based Medicine, 2011.

Nursing Education 2.0 via YouTube

Nursing Education 2.0: YouTube
Diane J. Skiba, Nursing Education Perspectives: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 100–102.

I found this article in the bimonthly Nursing Education Perspectives via my SiteMeter referral tracker. It mentioned the post Echocardiograms and Cases on You Tube.

The collaborative medical encyclopedia AskDrWiki has used YouTube/Google Video extensively to upload more than 140 coronary angiogram videos. All are free to watch.

An abstract about the experience of AskDrWiki founders with using YouTube for cardiology education will be presented at the annual meeting of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) in Cleveland, Ohio in July. In total, we submitted 6 abstracts focused on using new technologies (Web 2.0 and other tools) in medical education. All of them were accepted and will be published in the The Journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (JIAMSE).

Further reading:
YouTube for Your Business. PC World, 06/2007.
Video tutorial: How to get yourself on YouTube, for business or pleasure. ComputerWorld, 06/2007.
BioMed Central's You Tube channel: videos from BioMed Central's authors and editors, 09/2007.
Negative Immunization Videos Posted on YouTube May Contradict Facts, Experts Warn. WebMD Medical News, 12/2007.
YouTube as a Source of Information on Immunization: A Content Analysis. JAMA, 12/2007.
Click to play: YouTube and similar sites have more doctors getting ready for their close-ups. AMNews, 01/2008.

Related:
YouTube Feeds. Google Operating System, 01/2008.
YouTube as a Source of Health Misinformation. Highlight HEALTH 2.0, 02/2008.

YouTube as a source of information on immunization: a content analysis. Keelan et al. JAMA. 2007 Dec 5;298(21):2482-4.