Development of educational image databases and e-books for medical physics training.

Medical physics education and training requires the use of extensive imaging material and specific explanations. These requirements provide an excellent background for application of e-Learning. The EU projects Consortia EMERALD and EMIT developed five volumes of such materials, now used in 65 countries. EMERALD developed e-Learning materials in three areas of medical physics (X-ray diagnostic radiology, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy). EMIT developed e-Learning materials in two further areas: ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. This paper describes the development of these e-Learning materials (consisting of e-books and educational image databases). The e-books include tasks helping studying of various equipment and methods. The text of these PDF e-books is hyperlinked with respective images. The e-books are used through the readers' own Internet browser. Each Image Database (IDB) includes a browser, which displays hundreds of images of equipment, block diagrams and graphs, image quality examples, artefacts, etc. Both the e-books and IDB are engraved on five separate CD-ROMs. Demo of these materials can be taken from www.emerald2.net.