2005 Scientific Session Abstracts
A Web Application Setup for Surgical Pathology Unknown Slides Conference
You-Wen Qian, MD, MSc . ( kevin_chian@yahoo.com), Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School, NJ
Context: To improve their diagnostic skills, surgical pathology residents need to see large amounts of material. Unknown slide conferences, as a mechanism to accumulate diagnostic knowledge, have been widely used in Surgical Pathology residency training. However, time allocated for these conferences is sometimes limited due to the residents’ service responsibilities. Additional learning is thus required. To provide flexibility for Surgical Pathology residents to learn, a web site where interesting and typical cases with discussions are presented would be very useful. There are currently only a handful of web sites available with the aforementioned functionality.
Technology: A complete Client-Server Network application has been built. The technologies employed in this study include: Apache-Jakarta Tomcat server container (version 5.0.27), mySQL (version 4.17) database server, and Java Server Pager (JSP) 2.0 specification.
Design : (1). Client Side Scripting- Form is used for users to sign in. Javascipt is employed to validate the user’s input in the Form. The username and password entered will be verified for user authentication by comparing with those in the server side database where each user has a unique username and password. (2). Server Side Programming-Tomcat Apache, as a server side Web Application container, hosts the web application. Java Server Pager (JSP) technology is incorporated extensively in the server side programming that connects to serve side database and presents the data to users. (3). Server Side Database - Integrated with Tomcat is mySQL database sitting in the server side. One table holds usernames and passwords and demographic information. Several other tables are used to store users’ response to the unknown slides tests. i.e. each user’s answers, et al.
Results : All users have their own separate accounts. From this web site, users can take unknown slide tests that are grouped by dates. They can also view their own answer sheets and check the final answers with discussions.
Conclusion : This web application is currently running in the local host. It has yet to be incorporated into the department home page. It is foreseeable that this application can be available to the public as a free educational resource once enough material is accumulated.