COLLABORATION USING INTERNET FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CASE-BASED TEACHING FILES - REPORT OF THE COMPUTER AND INSTRUMENTATION COUNCIL INTERNETFOCUS GROUP

The Internet and particularly the World-Wide-Web is becoming a useful tool for the nuclear medicine community. Methods: The Computer and Ins trumentation Council of the Society of Nuclear Medicine convened an In ternet Focus group to discuss collaboration using the Internet. The pr ototype application considered was development of case-based teaching files using the World-Wide-Web. Teaching file cases (clinical history, images, description of findings and discussion) on World-Wide-Web ser vers at different institutions are integrated using the Internet. The user can navigate from case to case using point-and-click hypertext li nking. Results: The initial experience with collaboration has been enc ouraging. An etiquette to help foster collaboration has been proposed. Development of quality control mechanisms and introduction of peer re view were identified as issues needing further work. Conclusion: The W orld-Wide-Web offers great potential for new forms of collaboration. T here is, however, a need to learn how to make best use of this new res ource.