Faculty at UC Davis Health has collaborated with the California Digital Library (CDL) and Blaisdell Medical Library to release Ultrasound in Resource-Limited Settings: A Case Based, Open Access Text using the Manifold platform. The new online resource aims to provide an open access clinical resource for radiologists and clinicians who practice ultrasound in low and limited resourced healthcare settings. The project was conceived of and developed by two UC Davis Health physicians: Dr Michael Schick and Dr Rebecca Stein-Wexler, with help from Aida Nasirishargh as the online editor. Schick and Stein-Wexler have been teaching and using ultrasound for many years in some of the least resourced healthcare settings in the world. In these regions, most people have no access to diagnostic imaging. Ultrasound is particularly positioned to help fill this gap as the most portable, inexpensive, and versatile form of diagnostic imaging.
The team’s goal was to create an up-to-date and useful resource for those who use ultrasound to take care of vulnerable patients around the globe. Drs. Schick and Stein-Wexler envisioned a text that was concise and clinically relevant, with high quality images and discussion that could be easily accessed, shared and downloaded in areas with limited internet bandwidth — a living text that would be translated into multiple languages and continue to grow as future impactful cases were identified and new techniques were discovered.
The project is a collaborative effort by health care practitioners worldwide who use point-of-care and comprehensive ultrasound. Each chapter is authored by experts with case-based knowledge of both ultrasound and the highlighted disease. The chapters are 100% case based and provide important insight into how experts practice medicine and apply ultrasound in the limited resourced healthcare setting. By scrolling through chapters, high quality videos (in bandwidth-efficient GIF format) can be played automatically, and full-resolution video files are available for download and sharing.
When Drs. Schick and Stein-Wexler consulted with Blaisdell Medical Library about publishing options for the unique work, health sciences librarian Amy Studer saw the opportunity to connect them with CDL to investigate the possibility of hosting their work on an open access publishing platform. Because of the large number of videos and images needed to illustrate the concepts in the text, CDL identified the Manifold platform as the best system for building and displaying the work.
In the coming months, Ultrasound in Resource-Limited Settings will be released in several different languages including Spanish and Farci, initially, with many others to follow. Ultrasound in Resource-Limited Settings: A Case Based, Open Access Text is available now at https://manifold.escholarship.org/projects/ultrasound-in-resource-limited-settings.
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