Learning tumor diagnostics and medical image processing via the WWW - the case-based radiological textbook ODITEB

New Internet technologies offer excellent chances to build high-quality on- line learning media for the education in medicine. Especially, the teaching of diagnostics with medical imaging as well as medical image processing ca n be supported by the excellent visualization and interaction capabilities. In cooperation with three radiological departments at German universities in Munich, Erlangen and Wurzburg, the case-based open distributed Internet text book (ODITEB) for tumor diagnosis of the GI-tract. liver, pancreas and thorax has been developed at the Institut fur Medizinische Statistik und E pidemiologie (IMSE) of the Technische Universitat Munchen. It offers a big collection of clinical tumor cases located on servers at the provider sites Munich, Erlangen and Wurzburg, Visualization and interaction similar to a real CT or MRI console, original DICOM data, X-rays and endoscopic and endo sonographic videos, and expert-guided tours through the cases. In a first e valuation in summer 1998, 32 medical students graded the application with 1 .9 ('good') on a scale from 1 ('very good') to 5 ('very bad'). The textbook supports German language, an English version is in preparation. In a secon d part, it contains lessons in medical image processing for students of med ical informatics. An ODITEB release 2 with several improvements will be fin ished until February 2000, The use of the textbook is free of cost. (C) 200 0 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.