Teaching with computers

Various methods of using computers in education have been presented. Although the interesting file, interactive video, and bibliographic searches stand on their own, a far better approach is to integrate them, so that the radiologist learning new techniques in interventional procedures, for instance, could search the current literature quickly and easily for new articles using the bibliographic search facility and could review interesting cases from the teaching file that pertained to the lesson at hand. One very important attempt to integrate some of these teaching functions in conjunction with other aspects of medical school administration and research has been the Integrated Academic Information Management Systems (IAIMS) Program of the National Library of Medicine. This program stems from a report created by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which was funded originally by the National Library of Medicine. This program has funded several teaching institutions to first plan for an integrated approach to medical information (Fig. 7) and then implement prototype systems. As medical image management systems become available (see the article entitled "Digital Image Management: Networking, Display, and Archiving"), they will be a major component of these information networks and will be most important for teaching purposes. Integrating the teaching components described earlier with the medical image management system will be most important.