by Leif Kullman
Web sites of interest in Oral Radiology
All of us live today in big information society, I myself have a problem to get time to keep up with old routines like checking my daily newspaper, following the news in TV and so on. So rather often I prefer to use Internet instead for doing a lot of these things.
The other day I even tried to phone from Saudi Arabia to Sweden using a PC to Phone program in Internet. It is a very cheap way to make long distance calls, This time I didn't succeed but next time I will hopefully make it.
Also for my work I use Internet a lot and there is of course today a fast growing number of Web sides in Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology.
Since I started to use Internet I have found sites that I think are very informative and good and in this report I will tell you a little more about a couple of these. Of course there may be other good ones, but the following three has been in Internet for a long time and the get better all the time.
In the first one online courses in Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology can be taken.
The homepage is maintained and created by dr. Stuart White with co-workers in UCLA (School of Dentistry, Oral Radiology, Los Angeles). The address is
http://www.dent.ucla.edu/sod/depts/oral_rad/courses/
The courses are interactive, an answer should be written of the reader and after that the correct answers are given. In figure 1 you can see how it might look like, working with one of the courses.
Dr. Stuart is also the creator of a program called ORADII. This software assists in generating a differential diagnosis for different radiographic lesions of the jaws. The reader, who wants support to establish differential diagnosis is supposed to provide information about his found lesion and the software will compare this information to data from over 130 of the most common lesions manifested in the maxilla or mandible. See figure 2 for an example.
The address to this program is
In the following site you are taken to the Hospital of Dentistry in Nagasaki.
http://w3.dh.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/tf/Contents.html
There are a lot of patient cases are included. But the diagnosis are given immediately, the site is not interactive in the same way as the one in UCLA.
Finally we find a very nice site in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Responsible is the Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology in Dalhousie University.
Their web side was established already 1994, it was the first WWW site for Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology. The address is
http://bpass.dentistry.dal.ca/
Six patient case studies are here supplied, with a lot of radiographs and descriptions of the lesions and differential and also definitive diagnoses are given.
So don't hesitate, just plunge yourself out into our big cyber space! It is really a nice and interesting place but of course in the same time in some aspect dangerous. It is very easy to spend too many hours in front of the monitor.
When I find an interesting pathological lesion today, my first step is to make a search in Internet. Usually I find a lot of information here, if not I use to take out my old textbooks in Pathology of course.
