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Show Neuro-Ophthalmology News Section Editors: Kathleen B. Digre, MD Seay Meagan, DO Neuro-Ophthalmology at Your Fingertips: A Free Website Authored by Jonathan Trobe, MD K athleen Digre invited me to tell you about NEUROOPHTHALMOLOGY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS, a new website that I have authored (https://fingertips.neuroophthalmology.med.umich.edu/). Parts of it will shortly become available on the NOVEL site. We love books, but our trainees are now mostly getting their facts elsewhere—a few clicks away! Online material can be cross-linked through hypertext, supported with an almost unlimited number of illustrations, and updated instantly. Books simply cannot match that versatility. I did not want to limit access to FINGERTIPS, so I chose a website rather than an app and made it free. I copied the style of the Audubon bird books: each topic is introduced by a representative icon and documented with responses to What is it? What does it look like? What else looks like it? What should you do? What will happen? Bulleted text is heavily fortified with animated drawings (called “gifs”) of anatomic pathways, fundus and external photographs, brain scans, and patient videos from my collection. For the anatomic illustrations, I am grateful to David Murrel and Robert Prusak. To convert the rough patient videos into deidentified, voiced-over narratives, I needed the expertise of the University of Michigan video editors Marc Stephens, Tim Steffens, and Richard Hackel, who worked with me for more than 800 hours. Andrew Moses, a brilliant University of Michigan computer scientist, came up with the basic web design and did all the programming. The entire project was underwritten by a gift from Bithika and Vikas Kheterpal. To appeal to a wide variety of learners (neuroophthalmology fellows; residents in ophthalmology, neu- e396 rology, and neurosurgery; optometrists, medical students, and ancillary ophthalmic personnel), the material comes in graded levels of complexity. Users will pick what they need. To make it more fun, I inserted “Tips” (in green font) and “Traps” (in red font). Everything on the site has been vetted by my neuro-ophthalmology fellows and refined by the noted neuro-ophthalmologist Valerie Purvin, MD. Doctors learn by solving clinical problems. Hence, I added 100 multiple-choice problem cases. If you select the right answer, you get an “enrichment” package that reviews the nuances of the problem. If you need more information before committing yourself to an answer, you can find it by linking directly to the didactic section. By the way, the University of Michigan trainees, who are charged with studying this website, often try first to answer the quiz questions and then work their way backwards to the didactic material. The quiz is automatically scored by the number of first-choice correct answers, so that teachers may use it as a measure of proficiency. All in all, this project took 15 years to complete. I think of it as the last major effort of my career—one that I have formally dedicated to my colleagues at NANOS and around the world. Jonathan D. Trobe, MD Departments of Ophthalmology and Visual Science (Kellogg Eye Center) and Neurology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Trobe: J Neuro-Ophthalmol 2021; 41: e396 Copyright © North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. |
