University of Utah
Department of Pathology
Salt Lake City, Utah
Scott Anderson, MD

Scott R. Anderson, MD, Joseph H. Willman, MD, Michael Berry, CT(ASCP), C. Jay Marshall, MD

Background: As costs of educating technologists and residents increase, development of low cost but highly functional image-based teaching materials becomes increasingly important. Obstacles to creation of such tools have been cost of computer and camera technology, difficulty in acquiring large numbers of high-quality digital images, and speed and storage capacity. Advances in all of these areas now allow “in-house” creation of versatile, user friendly, image-based teaching applications. We describe development of a simple application designed for online use as well as for use in teaching cytotechnology students and pathology residents.

Design: WebCyt™ is an interactive cytology teaching program including exfoliative and fine needle aspiration cytology. Cases are from the University of Utah Cytotechnology School teaching files and include clinical information, teaching points and digital photomicrographs. The application was programmed in HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0, and includes a few simple JavaScript routines for highlighting parts of images. Individual case pages also use frames to allow continued viewing of images while scrolling through teaching points. Separate tutorials and tests draw from case images and teaching points. Photomicrographs were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950™ through the eyepiece of an Olympus BH-2™ microscope, or were captured from kodachromes using a Happenstance Slide Copier. Images were massaged using ACDSee™ 3.1 and saved as JPEG files to reduce size and speed download. Thumbnails highlight teaching points and facilitate movement between images of interest.

Results and Conclusion: Use of standardized HTML 4.0 page templates including cascading styles sheets, a hierarchical file structure, development of thorough documentation and instructions for use, and ability to capture images through the microscope eyepiece have allowed us to rapidly develop a useful, image-based teaching tool. It is best viewed with Netscape 4.5 or higher, on at least a 14-inch color monitor. Use of this tool has also allowed organization of our teaching files in a more functional manner and acts as a repository for all of our teaching cases. Development of such "in-house" teaching applications is now within reach of most teaching programs and will likely continue to gain popularity as resources for education become even more limited.