Multimedia lectures for visually oriented medical disciplines

Abstract

Many scientific disciplines with an intrinsically high degree of multimedia content can be found among the life-sciences. Among the various faculties of medicine, especially dermatology is renowned for extensive use of clinical images in lectures and in textbooks. Training the "diagnostic eye" is an important part of the medical education. Furthermore, large collections of images, traditionally organized in numerous cabinets of slides, can be maintained and distributed a lot easier when their digitized counterparts are stored in an image database on some PC in the clinic's network. Thus, ideal conditions should hold for introduction of computer-based multimedia-lectures for dermatology and the distribution of teaching material on CD-ROMs or over the World Wide Web. This paper gives an account of an interdisciplinary multimedia project of three dermatology-departments, an institute for medical psychology and our chair. Since most of the implemented tools have been field-tested in recent semesters, we also can report about usability and acceptance among lecturers and students. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.