The aim of Radiopaedia.org is to develop an online text where information is up to date and relevant to the needs of radiology staff, both registrars and consultants.


By Francesco Gaillard

It has struck me over the years, that as a profession we each have an expensive library of textbooks, we read &/or subscribe to 'peer reviews' journals (who are these peers?) and collect libraries of films. We then interact only with colleagues in our immediate vicinity, great cases seeing the light of day at most a few times a year during tutorials.

Simultaneously when we have a presentation to prepare we scour the net to look for images, often using them without obtaining the full permission of those who hold the copyright. In addition, we each find errors in textbooks and articles which we cannot correct - each mistake causing thousands of us to individually try and find the answer.

My idea was simple: to gather a small fraction of our collective knowledge and libraries in a single site which can act as a digital reference, without subscription fees, or copyright. A true peer reviewed site, where errors can be found and corrected, discussion on difficult or controversial topics be had, and images submitted and used.

This site first went up at 23:38 on Tuesday 6 December 2005, at the time called wikiradiology, as a place to put some of my own notes, as I was studying for my fellowship exams. This ran from a home PC server put together from salvaged parts. At the start of 2007, I uploaded the site to a proper server, changed the name to Radiopaedia.org and gave it a face lift thanks to a skin designed by Paul Gu. It has now been opened to the radiology public.

Aim of Radiopaedia.org
The aim of Radiopaedia.org is to develop an online text where information is up to date and relevant to the needs of radiology staff, both registrars and consultants. In addition, the wiki format will allow discussion of topics and resolution of areas of confusion. There are many worthwhile online resources already, however most are not collaborative and therefore lack the ability to respond to users needs.

Anyone can create an article. Anyone can edit an existing one. Contributions remain logged to your name, and can be included in your CV, along with a link to your User Page.

Due to the immediacy of editing, new information can be introduced immediately when it becomes available. Errors can be corrected immediately, with no need to wait for the next edition. All the content is licensed under creative commons which allows for non-commercial use of all content, while maintaining attribution privileges for contributors of images.

How big a task is this?
Well, as a benchmark, Dahnert has approximately 3,000 listings in the index, spread over 1,200 pages. Similarly Primer of Diagnostic Imaging by Weissleder et al has approximately 3,500 index entries over approximately 1,000 pages.

That is however, the power and beauty of collaborative work, each person need only submit a small portion. Wikipedia the grand-daddy of all wikis has over 860,000 articles, every single one written by its users.

The future..
Overtime, and as the Radiopaedia.org community grows more features can be added, including but by no means limited to:

• Case archive.
• Multiple choice questions.
• 'Ask an expert'.
• Protocols for studies.
• Tutorials in image reconstruction.

Each user has the ability to influence Radiopaedia.org, to better make it reflect our needs.

I hope you will take this opportunity to create a resource that will be available to all radiologists, everywhere, for free.

Written by Radiopaedia.org’s creator Francesco Gaillard.