The New England Journal of Medicine Image Challenge “provides an opportunity for you to use the clinical images from NEJM to test your diagnostic skills.

A new image and question appears each week, along with several possible answers. Before selecting an answer, you can take a closer look by zooming in and moving the image within the frame. You can also look at the relative distribution of answers chosen by other users.” Source: NEJM.

The Image Challenge is a good review tool for USMLE, ABIM or residency in-service exams. When I studied for USMLE, I used to group clinical images from NEJM under system headings, e.g. Cardiology, Pulmonology, etc. but the image quiz/challenge is more fun.

The NEJM Image Challenge is, in a sense, a Web 2.0 tool — it relies on user-created content in terms of recording readers’ responses and comparing them to correct answers. It is surprising to see that for many image challenges the readers (”the crowd”) did not get the right answer despite the massive participation of tens of thousands of responders for some queries — click to enlarge the image above for an example. This

may be an indication that for professional fields like medicine the “wisdom of crowds” concept does not work as well as, for example, Digg.com or Wikipedia. I would prefer an expert’s opinion over the crowd’s opinion most of the time, I think.

It could be an interesting mini-research project to have a look at all the answers in the NEJM Image Challenge and to see how many times the “crowd” got it wrong versus the “expert” (NEJM) who provides the correct answer. In August 2007, I looked at all questions and answers available on the NEJM website and calculated the percentage of correct answers and the number of responses per question. The results showed that there were on average 8300 responses per question and the “crowd” solved correctly only 69% of the image challenges.

Related:
Make the Largest Encyclopedia in the World Better. I already did (I hope), 9/28/2005.
Digg for Medicine: Nature Publishing Group Launches Dissect Medicine, 5/03/2006.
Edit Wars in Medical Wikipedia, 12/09/2006.
Google Finds Correct Diagnosis in 58 % of Cases Published in NEJM, 11/11/2006.
Link via ScienceRoll.com.

Created: 08/23/2007
Updated: 12/17/2007

Original post by Clinical Cases