Imagistic Digital Library for Hybrid Medical Learning

The paper presents an e-learning platform (TESYS) that enhances the possibilities of the traditional medical teaching. It allows students to use modern tools for information access and continuously testing their knowledge. Although medical learning cannot replace direct transfer of knowledge performed during hospital practice hours, when the teacher presents to students different medical cases with all complementary information (medical investigations, diagnosis, applied treatment, disease evolution), the e-learning solution can offer significant advantages It can be said that the hybrid learning is the best solution for the medical teaching. An element of originality brought by the TESYS platform is a medical imagistic database that can be updated by the specialists with images acquired from different patients in the diagnosis and treatment process. A series of alphanumerical information: diagnosis, treatment and patient evolution can be added for each image. The second element of originality is the content-based visual query that uses characteristics that were automatically extracted from medical images (color, texture, regions). It can be used both in the training process and e-testing process. Using content-based visual query with other access methods (text-based, hierarchical methods) on a teaching image database allows students to see images and associated information from database in a simple and direct manner. This method stimulates learning, by comparing similar cases along with their particularities, or by comparing cases that are visually similar, but with different diagnoses.