Images are essential to medicine - a picture is worth a thousand words, providing concentrated, accurate information available in no other way. The field of medicine uses a vast quantity and variety of images, some familiar to the layperson, such as X-rays, CTs, ECGs, and ultrasound scans, and others less familiar, microscopic slides, MR scans and angiograms for example. Diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions frequently depends on the production and interpretation of images such as those outlined above.
Images are vital for medical education - Medical and Healthcare professionals need to be familiar with such pictures from an early stage and will use them throughout their careers.
With the trend towards treating patients in the community or as day cases without hospitalisation, medical students now have reduced contact with patients and can thus only gain exposure to many medical conditions through the use of pictures and multimedia resources.
However the availability of such images to students is currently very limited, as they are hard to find and costly to reproduce. MIDRIB will provide access to images, immediately and without cost, via the WWW or a local network.
Why is a centralised digital resource necessary?The images ordinarily in use by most clinicians and academics in the field are stored individually and in their original raw format (i.e. on microscope slides, paper, film, etc.). In this form these collections can only be made available for use within the originating departments or borrowed at some inconvenience.
The interdisciplinary nature of medicine means that these collections are also of interest to practitioners in a wide range of related subjects allied to medicine. A centralised bank of digital images will make such resources accessible to all.
Most Medical faculties throughout the UK are building up their own collections of images, which leads to an enormous duplication of effort. MIDRIB will remove the need for this, transferring images rapidly to all medical schools in the country via the high-speed SuperJanet inter-university network.
A number of workshops and seminars will be arranged to train members of the medical community to turn their own material into digital form, thereby providing them with valuable expertise and enabling them to contribute their material to the MIDRIB resource in the most valuable format. Workshops will also be held to communicate non-subject specific experience to those engaged in similar work in other disciplines.
MIDRIB will generate experience and expertise in a number of other issues and techniques. Since many of these will be of a generic nature and not confined to medicine, the project will have a wide application and impact. They include:
As this project matures during the next couple of years, this resource has the potential to become the natural repository for collections of images produced by individuals and departments throughout the Higher Education sector - an easily-accessible, comprehensive and continually growing store of medical images.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on July 15th 1996