Medlantis

Abstract

Medlantis, sold by Thieme Medical Publishers, brings together in a single product access to a wide variety of content in radiology, including continuing medical education (CME) packages and digital presentations; electronic books, electronic journals, and images via Thieme eRadiology; and video case studies via Thieme RadCases. Altogether there are more than 99,000 images, 3,000 case studies, 400 digital presentations, 100 electronic books, and 80 CME packages, as well as 2 electronic journals, Seminars in Interventional Radiology and Seminars in Musculoskeletal Radiology. There are CME packages in such subject areas as angiography, echocardiography, and mammography; digital presentations covering radiology of the abdomen, radiation oncology, and radiation physics; and electronic books like Diagnostic Imaging of the Foot and Ankle, Interventional Ultrasound, and The Physics of Clinical MR Taught Through Images. Its intended audience is radiology students, researchers, instructors, and clinicians.

Medlantis. Thieme Medical Publishers, 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001; customerservice@ thieme.com, [email protected]; ,http://www.medlantis.org.; institutional subscriptions only, contact vendor for pricing.

Medlantis, sold by Thieme Medical Publishers, brings together in a single product access to a wide variety of content in radiology, including continuing medical education (CME) packages and digital presentations; electronic books, electronic journals, and images via Thieme eRadiology; and video case studies via Thieme RadCases. Altogether there are more than 99,000 images, 3,000 case studies, 400 digital presentations, 100 electronic books, and 80 CME packages, as well as 2 electronic journals, Seminars in Interventional Radiology and Seminars in Musculoskeletal Radiology. There are CME packages in such subject areas as angiography, echocardiography, and mammography; digital presentations covering radiology of the abdomen, radiation oncology, and radiation physics; and electronic books like Diagnostic Imaging of the Foot and Ankle, Interventional Ultrasound, and The Physics of Clinical MR Taught Through Images. Its intended audience is radiology students, researchers, instructors, and clinicians.

The digital presentations feature allows users to view prerecorded PowerPoint presentations ranging in length from several minutes to a half hour or more. These presentations can be searched by keyword and browsed by lecturer name, title, specialty, and modality (type of radiology), and include presentations from clinicians at institutions such as Brown University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of Washington. Links to other content in Medlantis are included with many of the presentations; there is a note-taking feature for users; and users can even submit questions directly to Medlantis in the context of the presentations. The digital presentations component of Medlantis is a useful feature but could be improved by enabling the user to search, not just browse, by lecturer name or even lecturer organization. Together with the digital presentations, the CME packages can also be searched by keyword and cover a wide variety of subject areas. They range from one-half to three CME credits each and appear to have been published in 2013. Each package includes at least one instructional video module and accompanying multiple choice quiz.

eRadiology includes electronic books, electronic journals, images, and a traditional HTML view of RadCases. Electronic books can be searched by generic keyword or field-specific keyword using typical bibliographic fields like author, tables, and figure description, as well as medical descriptor fields like cerebrovascular, pain, and pediatric. In the e-book section of eRadiology, users are initially presented with a list of the e-books in the collection. Each e-book can be viewed in HTML or in a ''pages'' format. In the HTML view, books can be browsed by section or keyword and include an index that links back to the appropriate section of the book. Users can also zoom in and out of a section textblock, print a section, and toggle back and forth between full page views and views that permit the user to see the book's table of contents and section panes. In the ''pages'' view, users can opt to look at a single page, two pages, or a screen that provides a titled view of the book's pages. Users can zoom in and out on each of these views and can print out images of each page (not PDFs). In both views, there is an information button that provides basic bibliographic metadata (author, publication date, ISBN, etc.) about the book. Thieme continues to update this section of Medlantis, which includes nearly fifty titles published in the last six years, with three titles published so far in 2015.

The electronic journals section of eRadiology includes access to the last five years of two Thieme radiology titles-Seminars in Interventional Radiology and Seminars in Musculoskeletal Radiology-and allows the user to search by keyword or browse each journal by issue and year. The title of each article is hyperlinked and takes the user into the full Thieme journal website, providing the user with access to the journal abstract, full text (including PDF download), references, and figures. The images section of eRadiology enables users to do keyword searches for images (with an autocomplete feature in the search box) and then click through each of the images that result from the keyword search. Images can be exported into PowerPoint, and users can also click through to the cases in RadCases that utilize the images retrieved in the user 's search.

RadCases can be accessed from within eRadiology and as a standalone component within Medlantis. RadCases is presented in eRadiology in a fairly straightforward HTML format with basic and advanced searching capability. Each case consists of several components, including a clinical presentation, ''further work-up,'' ''imaging findings,'' differential diagnosis, essential facts, other imaging findings, ''pearls and pitfalls,'' and a short bibliography. The RadCases standalone component is much more robust and provides users with several different options for finding a case, including viewing one hundred random cases, resuming cases the user had accessed in previous sessions, searching by case number, and searching by several different criteria specific to each case, such as patient gender and age, anatomical system, radiological modality, type of disease, and critical or atypical status of the disease. Users can also mark cases that they have mastered or need to revisit. Finally, users can move the radiological images in each case around the screen and zoom in and out on them to get a better view. Users can choose between viewing RadCases in Flash or HTML5.

AlthoughMedlantisdoesan excellent job of bringing together a wide variety of different types of radiology content-PowerPoint slide decks, CME packages, radiology cases, electronic books, electronic journals, and images- much work remains to be done in integrating this product. There is no seamless way to get to all of the Medlantis content: the slide decks and CME packages are separate from the images, electronic books, and electronic journals, and the RadCases can be accessed in two different formats from separate sections of the website. In fact, this reviewer isn't even sure what to call this product: is it ''Medlantis'' or ''eRadiology'' or ''RadCases?'' This reviewer has other questions: does Medlantis include the other two components?; should RadCases be considered part of eRadiology?; and so on. In addition, Medlantis does not include several typical features one would normally expect in a licensed electronic resource: the advanced search for electronic books is not available until the user does a basic search first; the electronic books do not provide chapterlevel PDF downloads; and the journals are not organized in the typical title/volume/issue format. Finally, user access to the Medlantis component of this product is via username and password, whereas user access to the eRadiology and RadCases components is via Internet protocol (IP) authentication.

Users will appreciate having access to a great deal of radiological content in one online source, rather than having to connect to books on radiology via one product, case studies via another, and so on, but Medlantis could use quite a bit of improvement in how the various types of content are presented and integrated with one another. With Medlantis, Thieme appears to be following the lead of some of its competitors in the medical information market in integrating a wide variety of content types in a single specialty into one product, but more work needs to go into this product to bring it up to the level of some of the other specialtybased resources currently on the market.