Methods
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Methods

We reviewed the teaching files that we found using RSNA Launch Pad (http://www.rsna.org/RSNA2/launchpad/casestudies.html) and we used Copernic 98 (Agents Technologies (MEB) Corp)  to search multiple search engines on the Internet. Copernic 98 is an intelligent agent that carries out your net-searches by simultaneously consulting the most important search engines of the Internet.  Using a custom-made web browser interfaced to an Access database we collected over 65,000 links  . After excluding links that did not belong to teaching cases we were left with over 23,000  links, belonging to 8,800 teaching cases. Using an off-line browser (Teleport Pro.  Tennyson Maxwell, Cambridge, MA; www.tenmax.com) we downloaded most of these sites to our hard drive for faster review. We had available a fast Internet connection, over 1.5Gygabytes of data were downloaded overnight. For each teaching file we looked at:

• total number of cases
• cases per section divided in the ten sections of the oral boards
  • Chest
  • Cardiovascular
  • GI
  • GU
  • Mammo
  • Musculoskeletal
  • Neuro
  • Nuclear Medicine
  • Pediatrics
  • US
• depth of discussion
  • diagnosis only
  • brief discussion
  • long discussion
• how the cases are presented
  • as unknown
  • by diagnosis

• image size
  • maximum image size
  • average image size
• image type
  • GIF
  • JPEG
• image location
  • thumbnail with links to larger
• availability of CME
• cost per CME
• language
• diagnosis

These data were collected using a Microsoft Access 97 database using the following imput form:

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