Review of interdisciplinary online-image-databases and their usability in medical education

Images play a significant role in medical teaching. They can get prospective physicians acquainted with specific pathological changes as early as possible and they support training their diagnostic eye. The latest improvements in Web-Based-Training offer extensive features for cost-effective studying adjustable to the individual student's requirements. However, many web-sites provide only qualitatively heterogeneous data and a limited inventory of images. This generally complicates any systematic access to the information the student requires.During the last years, several projects were initiated trying to overcome these difficulties. Web-Portals should provide access to large sets of images in a centralized manner while encompassing several medical subjects. For five of these portals their applicability for medical education was investigated considering structure, navigation and search mechanisms. Some notable approaches to implementing the various search functions were observed. However, some sites have room for improvement concerning quality of content as well as clarity of presentation and navigation. Based on the problems discovered and the approaches found, a catalogue of requirements was compiled for creating a Web-Portal to optimally support medical education.