Professor Rodrigo Menezes Jales has been working with imaging diagnosis at the Hospital da Mulher - Caism for a long time. His name is also linked to medical education and, focusing on this topic, he decided to create the Dr Pixel website, which has already surpassed the one million hits mark in two and a half years since its first broadcast. Its target audience is medical students and residents interested in learning more about radiology and diagnostic imaging.
Currently, the site has around 2.500 hits per day, according to the doctor. Among other facilities, Internet users also have the possibility of accessing them through their smartphone (App). All available video classes can be organized and watched on Android and IOS mobile devices, in applications developed in partnership with Eldorado Institute. The links to download the applications are on Dr Pixel homepage.
Today, most consultations with Dr Pixel are carried out via smartphones and, according to Jales, 90% of accesses come from Brazil, mainly from the Southeast and South regions, and 5% come from other Portuguese-speaking (Portuguese-speaking) countries, such as Portugal, Angola and Mozambique. Although some of Dr Pixel's content has already been translated into English and Spanish, most of the content still appears in Portuguese, revealed Jales.
The name Dr Pixel was an allusion to the diagnosis that today uses digital images based on the 'pixel'. "As we work with medical images, I ended up adding the form of address 'Dr'", he explained. "I also imagined a caricature of a doctor with a mustache and glasses, created based on a photograph of the doctor Emílio Marussi, who retired in 2014 and who was, for years, the coordinator of Caism's Ultrasound Section. So this was a tribute to his extraordinary work and dedication."
Jales commented that the new increase Online for the teaching area (e-learning) was not a spur-of-the-moment thing. He had already been studying the tool and looking for ways to implement it for at least a decade, with the collaboration, on the content, of dozens of undergraduate medical students from both Unicamp and PUC-Campinas.
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The site's content is divided into cases and classes generally linked to women's health. “We have worked hundreds of hours in recent months on a major update to the website's format, which will now feature, among other new features, an area of cases submitted by students and structured tutorials with tests for students to assess their knowledge. The first tutorial will be on mammography,” she said.
Jales said he learns a lot from other sites in terms of content and format. The main ones are Radiopedia, AuntMinnie and the Radiology Assistant. "In Portuguese, we have the website of the Colégio Brasileiro de Radiologia and the Sociedade Paulista de Radiologia. In addition to the dedicated websites, we have thousands of videos on YouTube. This way, the only people who don’t want to learn won’t learn,” she believes.
The website, he highlighted, was planned based on free platforms. The current version was developed in Drupal. The more robust update needed to be programmed in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. The next step will be the possibility of measuring the knowledge gained by students attributable to Dr Pixel's content, emphasized Jales, which is currently being extensively addressed in updating the website.
The doctor reported that, in addition to him, publications on the website have only been possible thanks to the dedication of doctors Beatriz Regina Alvares and Klaus Schumacher, from the Department of Radiology, and Fabiana Silveira de Souza and Newton Silva, from the Information Technology Center of the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM). “We also have the support of the Regional Council of Medicine (CRM-SP) and the Departments of Tocogynecology and Radiology at FCM”, he informed.
