WWW - an effective way of teaching radiology

The Internet and especially the World Wide Web (WWW) have given new opportu nities and challenges in teaching radiology. In Kuopio University and Kuopi o University Hospital, we started to develop a new WWW-based radiology teac hing file in 1996. Our file was made as a result of weaknesses in other fil es and as an answer to our local needs. The file consists of 1245 separate radiographs in 14 different categories. The language is Finnish, because th e target use primarily is basic medical education in Finland. A small part has been translated into English. The quality of images was improved using a separate viewer (Osiris, Digital Imaging Unit, University Hospital of Gen eva, Switzerland), which also allowed image manipulation needed with radiol ogical images. We have monitored the utilisation of pages (Analog 1.92 beta -3.0/UNIX) and found the results encouraging. The follow-up time was 814 da ys (10 February 1997-27 September 1999), the total number of requests was 7 62 797 and that for HTML pages is 288 664. Monthly means are 27 243 and 10 309, respectively. The total number for visited domains is 61. The URL for these pages is http://www.uku.fi/laitokset/klrad/opetuskuvasto/. (C) 2001 E lsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.