Collaborative Hypertext of Radiology

About CHORUS

Collaborative Hypertext of Radiology

Overview

CHORUS is a "quick reference" hypertext for physicians and medical students. More than 1,100 documents describe:

diseases,
radiological findings,
differential-diagnosis lists ("gamuts"), and
pertinent anatomy, pathology, and physiology.

CHORUS documents are indexed topically by organ system and alphabetically by title. Docments are interconnected by a network of more than 2,200 hyperlinks.

CHORUS was developed using a "peer review" process that allowed Web-based submission and anonymous review of documents. All CHORUS documents have been reviewed (and updated as needed) within the past two years; the date of most recent update is indicated on each document.

System Use

More than 1 million CHORUS documents are viewed each month by users around the world. The CHORUS system and its documents are catalogued by a wide variety of general-interest and medical Web indexing services.

Background

CHORUS is based on Fact/File, a radiology hypertext reference that has been integrated with a clinical radiology information system (at the University of Chicago) since 1990. Fact/File has been used extensively, mostly by radiology residents who use it for quick review and for diagnostic decision support. To the original set of 810 documents, 12 authors have contributed more than 400 documents.

Metadata

CHORUS documents have been enhanced to include metadata (document descriptions) using the Dublin Core framework. To facilitate searches, our documents are indexed using Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Enhanced Navigation

We have applied an item-based collaborative filtering technique to CHORUS documents to ease navigation through the site. This approach identifies related documents based on the patterns of documents viewed by other users.

Images

As of 27 November 2006, CHORUS documents include images from ARRS GoldMiner. GoldMiner is a service of the American Roentgen Ray Society that discovers relevant images published in peer-reviewed radiology journals.

The CHORUS Logo

The figure is a detail of the François vase (the volute-krater of Kleitias, c. 570 B.C.), in which Theseus in festival dress leads the victory dance at Delos.

The Athenians were forced by King Minos of Crete to send a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be exposed to the Minotaur in his maze-like keep, the Labyrinth. Theseus, son of the Athenian king, sailed to Crete, threaded the maze with the help of the ball of thread given him by Minos' daughter, Ariadne, and slew the Minotaur. He followed the thread out of the Labyrinth and escaped by sea with the 13 young Athenians and Ariadne. They celebrated their deliverance by a dance, in which they mimed the process of their exit hand in hand.

Choral dance was a widespread phenomenon of ancient Greek culture, and arose much earlier than the dramatic chorus. The illustration symbolizes our collaborative effort to share medical knowledge.

Publications

Kahn CE Jr. A radiology hypertext system for education and clinical decision making. Journal of Digital Imaging 1991; 4:207-212.

Kahn CE Jr. Artificial intelligence in radiology: decision support systems. RadioGraphics 1994; 14:849-861.

Kahn CE Jr, Cheong CPF. Computer-supported collaboration in radiology: a multi-author, peer-reviewed reference hypertext published via the Internet. Radiology 1994; 193(P):478 (abstract).

Kahn CE Jr. CHORUS: a computer-based radiology handbook for international collaboration via the World Wide Web. RadioGraphics 1995; 15(4):963-970.

Kahn CE Jr. Collaborative filtering to improve navigation of large radiology knowledge resources. Journal of Digital Imaging 2005; 18:131-137.

Support

Development of CHORUS has been supported in part by a U.S. Public Health Service grant from the National Library of Medicine (USPHS G08 LM05705) for Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) planning at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Awards

	CHORUS has been named by Point as one of the Top 5% of all Web sites in terms of content, presentation, and overall quality!
	McKinley's Magellan service rates CHORUS among the leading Web sites.
	CHORUS is a recipient of Links2Go's "Key Resource" Award.
	CHORUS is included in the BioMedLink database of bio/medical Internet resources.
	... and numerous others

Clinical Information

Please visit the Medical College of Wisconsin's web sites:

MCW HealthLink -- online health information.
Medical College Physicians -- an online directory of MCW physicians and their clinical services.

Contact

Department of Radiology
Medical College of Wisconsin
8701 West Watertown Plank Road
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53226 USA

Charles E. Kahn, Jr., MD, MS, Editor
1 July 2004