Last Revised:  July 2007 

 

Instructions / Guidelines for submitting cases to the departmental Digital Teaching File (DTF)  

 

Dear Residents,

 

This document contains instructions and guidelines regarding how to submit DTF cases.  Beth Ward (baward@iupui.edu, 630-8788) is your facilitator and production assistant. You can send email to RadTF@iupui.edu as a mechanism for submitting your DTF cases.   Beth monitors this email account.  You can also email her directly. 

 

If you have not yet done so, please see this overview of expectations regarding your role in the DTF project.

 

Please follow these guidelines.  It's probably easiest to use a simple template derived from them.  Click here to download the template, copy/paste into Microsoft Word, fill it out, and attach to an email to RadTF@iupui.edu after reviewing it with your attending on the service.   If you do use a template, please use this one.   It helps keep things consistent for Beth and minimizes risk for unexpected problems when entering or transferring the content.   Some creative “automated” templates can cause problems (e.g., truncated fields, etc).

Here is what should be included in each DTF submission:

 

  1. Rotation for which submitted.  The 2007-2008 academic year starts with H01.  Numbered sequentially H01-H13.
  2. Patient name
  3. Patient MRN
  4. Your full name
  5. The attending radiologist with whom you conferred
  6. Hospital name (so we know what PACS to look on)
  7. Clinical history
  8. Image info (Beth uses this to look up & pull the images):
    1. Date and type of all imaging exams (times too if needed to differentiate among many exams on same date)
    2. Image numbers AND series numbers to identify significant images on cross sectional imaging studies.  Level/Window if CT. 
    3. Name of pulse sequences of MRI (e.g. T2 w/ fat sat, GE, STIR)
  9. Findings:  Good CONCISE descriptions of the imaging findings for EACH modality used (i.e. plain film, CT, MRI, PET).  If you want to copy and paste from the careweb reports you can, but clean it up if it's just a bunch of hedges.
  10. Differential Diagnosis:  A practical differential of usually 5-6 things.   Even if the images show an "auntminnie", you should still include a DDX.  If no radiological DDX (i.e. if it only can be one thing) then include a DDX for the clinical presentation rather than radiological findings.
  11. Diagnosis (or presumed diagnosis)
  12. Essential / salient knowledge points: List of at least 8-10 bullet points that includes the essential / salient elements regarding the diagnosis, its work-up, and any important "caveats" relating thereto.  Try to write HIGH YIELD info that will serve well as either board-review material or (for more junior-level cases) the "what a radiologist needs to know" nuggets.  Please aim for the brain-level of radiology residency. 
  13. References.   (Include any references that you used to compose your case. No more than 5. Please list each one as a separate paragraph).
  14. Include any special instructions or suggestions regarding case flow or teaching points.
  15. Any special info for Beth?
  16. Do you want to be acknowledged if your case is used online (i.e., auntminnie.com, by the ACR, or other future use)? 

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Useful Info:

 

Your DTF Assistant:  Beth Ward is your primary contact for your participation in the digital teaching file project:  baward@iupui.edu (630-8788) located at Wishard Hospital and will serve as a liaison for you.  Beth is skilled with the digital teaching file software/infrastructure here.  She will pull images for you from any of our PACS systems and will also digitize hardcopy films if necessary.

 

Stay in touch with Beth:  Email or call her if you have any questions about submitting content.  She will send you a hyperlink to your case material after she has input your write-up and pulled the images and has things ready for you to check.  Let her know that the images she has pulled and prepared for you are the correct images and are done correctly.   If you want to collect your own images and email them to her, that’s fine too.  She will still contact you to review the completed contents of the entire case when she has finished inputting that material.

 

To avoid submitting a duplicate case (i.e., on the same patient): You can always ask Beth to check for you.   Or, you can go to the Resident’s Wiki (http://indyradres.org/) and click the hyperlink to “Search for ALREADY-SUBMITTED Cases”  near top of page in the Digital Teaching File section.

 

Handy informational resources:   For both the DDX and the essential / salient knowledge points, there are several places to find good condensed info without having to plough through megatexts.  Resources include the materials that have previously been submitted to our DTF and/or published on auntminnie.com, as well as the discussion info from online ACR Learning File material that we have converted to online (you can't just copy it, but you can condense it into bullet points).    We will be (re)emailing hyperlinks to these resources.  Also check out these other resources:  eMedicine.com;  StatDX [our  dept has subscription to it], our own Consolidated Index of Cases; the ACR Case-in-Point collection; Dahnert, Primer, Case Review Books, Requisites.

 

What your aim should be:  Please submit something that you would want another resident to submit for you to study.  If you do a sloppy / superficial job, you will have wasted your time because you won't get credit for it and will be asked to redo it, plus also in the long run you are only raising your odds of multiple trips to Louisville.

 

Auntminnie competition:  The more thorough and higher-quality job you do with your case, especially the knowledge-work, the more likely you are to win the auntminnie competition if you are interested.  Writing an actual discussion rather than just telegraphic bullet points improves your chances but is by no means required in order to win (quality over quantity).  If you do write a discussion rather than bullet points, please arrange it into the following 3 sections.  The entire thing need not be more than a page long:

Discussion of Disease:  (A brief discussion of the disease/diagnosis that comprises the focus of the case. This should be approximately 2-3 paragraphs long. Not encyclopedic. Just the basic facts. By the way, if you have a spell checker, please spell-check your work before you send it. )

Radiologic Overview of the Diagnosis:  (Discussion of the radiological workup and typical findings. Not encyclopedic. Just the basic facts as a paragraph or two, or bulleted list.)

Key points: (3 or 4 take-home items in a bulleted list-- see directions for differential diagnosis above).

·         Key point 1

·         Key point 2

 

 

Using the DTF software yourself:  You are welcome to work with the software and collect your own content, build your own collection of cases, etc.  A "mini users manual" is available to download:  http://radtf.indyrad.iupui.edu/Edactic_Mini_Manual.doc  If you have specific questions or projects in mind, please contact Dr. Frank (marfrank@iupui.edu).  The DTF software is installed on essentially all IU Radiology PC's and several GE PACS workstations around the department.  Also available on the radiology "Portal" server (but you need to be careful about setting color depth to avoid blocky grey scale when you "snag" images that way).  You can download and install the DTF software on your own computers (for entering & managing content yourself).  Download this and double click it to begin the installation:
http://radtf.indyrad.iupui.edu/EDACTIC_AUTHOR_IU_INSTALLER.exe
This is the same software running on departmental PCs.  You will need administrator privileges on the computer for the install to work.