E-MEDI: INTERACTIVE WEB-BASED E-TRAINING FOR BREAST IMAGING Ι. Pratikakis, D. I.Kosmopoulos, V. Virvilis NCSR Demokritos, Inst. Of Informatics and Telecommunications, 15310 Aghia Paraskevi Greece A. Karahaliou Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, University of Patras, 265 00 Patras, Greece . Vassiou Department of Anatomy, School of Medicine, University of Thessaly, 41222 Larissa, Greece A. Damianakis Conceptum S.A.,10682,Athens,Greece S. Perantonis NCSR Demokritos, Inst. Of Informatics and Telecommunications, 15310 Aghia Paraskevi Greece ABSTRACT This paper concerns a Web-based e-Training platform that is dedicated to multimodal breast imaging. The assets of this platform are summarised in the following : (i) the efficient representation of the curriculum flow that will permit efficient training; (ii) efficient tagging of multimodal content appropriate for the completion of realistic cases and (iii) ubiquitous accessibility and platform independence via a web-based approach. KEYWORDS E-Training, Breast imaging, web-based learning 1. INTRODUCTION The essence of a medical doctor’s learning curriculum is the acquaintance with as many individual clinical cases as possible since the rate of success in diagnosis and treatment is directly proportional to the amount of this accumulated experience. This learning principle is directly applied to the field of radiology, where intensive training with medical images is required. Nowadays, the training in radiology at a European level is quite diverse both in curricula and quality due to the lack of appropriate content (tutorials and case-based learning material) as well as the lack of qualified trainers. Furthermore, there is an increasing demand for recruiting personnel specialized in medical imaging which is proportional to the increase of produced imaging volumes. In Sweden, imaging volumes are increasing by 2% to 5% per year. The U.K. and Canada are both seeing demand for imaging growing by 5% [ESS]. The demand isn't likely to fall. It is obvious that there is a gap which may be largely attributed to the deficiencies of the classic training methods described in the following. The number and complexity of the imaging modalities have increased dramatically over time. The last decades have brought about tremendous innovation in the field with magnetic resonance imaging, multi-slice computed tomography, positron emission tomography just to name a few. The work of radiologists is IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2007 19