The National Library of Medicine has announced the launch of MedPix®, a free online medical image database originally developed by the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics at the Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. The URL is https://medpix.nlm.nih.gov/.
The foundation for MedPix was a radiology study tool that was originally developed by Dr. J.G. Smirniotopoulos in 1984. In the early 1990s, as radiology was moving from film to digital imaging, there was simultaneously a merger of the diagnostic imaging residency programs of the two premier military hospitals: Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. In the summer of 1999, a Web-based digital teaching file based on the radiology study tool was built at USUHS to allow the two military training programs to share teaching file cases— https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html — a training requirement. Soon, other military hospitals and several civilian institutions joined MedPix. Over the past 16 years, MedPix has amassed an impressive collection of over 53,000 images from over 13,000 cases.
The MedPix collection categorises and classifies the image and patient data for each of several subsets of image database applications (e.g. radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, etc.). The content material is both high-quality and high-yield and includes both common and rare conditions. Most cases have a proven diagnosis (pathology, clinical follow-up). The teaching file cases are peer-reviewed by an Editorial Panel.
Continuing Medical Education (CME) and Nurse Education (CNE) were added to the MedPix system in 2001.
As a public education service, the NLM and MedPix provide the storage service, indexing, and Web server hosting. Individuals as well as institutions may participate. Contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor. No additional software required—your Internet browser is all you need!
The primary target audience includes resident and practicing physicians, medical students, nurses and graduate nursing students and other post-graduate trainees. The material is organised by disease category, disease location (organ system), and by patient profiles.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
