Below is an announcement from Dr. Ulysses Balis, Professor of Pathology and Director of Pathology Informatics at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
The University of Michigan Department of Pathology, Division of Pathology Informatics is very pleased to introduce a new educational tool for the global Pathology Community: www.Histoquery.org.
With use of this new crowd-sourcing tool, following a simple and fast user registration process, users will be able to post educational cases to the site (comprised of one or more pathology images and an associated diagnostic question), and then be able to receive a crowd-sourced answer in a matter of seconds. Similarly, users can log on to the site as a crowd-sourcing participant, with the option of either providing a new answer or providing a vote on an already-submitted answer. Every respondent gets one vote, which may be changed as needed (but, no ballot stuffing is possible).
An example of how this educational tool might be helpful would be: seeking consultation from your colleagues on a particularly difficult case in a weekly slide teaching set. Simply post an image or two along with any salient history (but no protected health information, please) and simply wait for the flow of answers and their associated histogram to appear, in real time. Result answers and counts are tabulated in real time for all to see, as a dynamically updated histogram and consequently, no web page updates or refreshes are ever required.
Just as much fun as submitting questions is the opportunity to respond to them! Users may assist in the answering of as many questions as they would like, in the sub-specialty or specialties of their interest. In responding to submitted questions, you become an important and essential component of the crowd-sourced equation! Background: The site is designed with the latest audience-participation, real-time web architecture and will easily accommodate hundreds of concurrent users without skipping a beat. When registering, you will have the choice of selecting as many pathology sub-specialties as you would like, for case monitoring purposes.
Cases may be submitted at any time to any available sub-specialty board, independent of the monitoring board elections that you have previously logged. An all-board-monitoring category is also available, for those who feel confident in assisting with any type of inbound question. Please forward all user support questions to me directly, at: [email protected] There is no fee to use this educational service and I very much look forward to hearing back from you on your initial experiences with the use of this new class of educational tool.
I think that this is an incredibly useful idea by Ul and his colleagues. We all know about the value of crowd-sourced knowledge. As noted in the note above, the web site will serve as a valuable education tool for residents and fellows as well as practicing pathologists.
Comments