www.tnt-radiology.de: Teach and be taught radiology: implementation of a web-based training program based on user preferences as determined by survery.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES

To create a Web-based training program addressing the needs of a large, heterogeneous audience of users.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We defined our target group as consisting of medical professionals who teach radiology, or who, by their own perception, would benefit from improving their radiologic image interpretation skills. We interviewed 483 members of this group, eliciting their preferences with regard to layout, interactivity, contents, and other categories (11 in total). Considering majority preferences as recommendations and using the help of a special interest group of medical students, we assembled 500 teaching cases over a 1-year period into an interactive training program and made it available on the World Wide Web.

RESULTS

Important preferences expressed by majorities of interviewees were: high levels of interactivity, clear layout, intuitive usability, short page load times, permissibility of saving content locally, cost-free access, consideration of user input in the site development. To our knowledge, our web program TNT-Radiology, accessible at , is the first to implement all of these recommendations simultaneously.

CONCLUSIONS

We have created a Web-based program usable for teaching and learning radiologic image interpretation that meets the needs of a heterogeneous target audience to an unprecedented extent.