Category: Other topics

Other topics that don’t necessarily have imaging or direct teaching topics

Online Neuroradiology Education – 10 Lessons Learned from using YouTube

Posted on by Brent Weinberg, MD

Online Neuroradiology Education – 10 Lessons Learned from using YouTube

This is a lecture that I gave at the American Society of Head and Neck Radiology (ASHNR) in 2024, reviewing some of my experiences using YouTube for neuroradiology education.

Introduction

I got involved with neuroradiology education because I had some educational materials that I wanted to share with students, residents, and fellows, but didn’t have enough time to give them. This languished for a while until I started posting board review materials, which were more popular. The increasing number of views inspired me to make more videos.

There is a large demand for online video education

Video education allows us to reach a different audience. It might be people who don’t learn well from traditional resources like books, and it may be people who don’t have the opportunity to come to a radiology residency

Availability and organization are key

People are much more likely to use free or inexpensive resources. When resources are behind a paywall, they aren’t accessible to people who can’t afford them, and people will just look elsewhere. Everything is sorted on the website here at learnneuroradiology.com.

Attention spans are short

Most people watch these videos on average for a little more than 3 minutes. When we make videos are longer, people are not really staying engaged. You lose a lot of people in the first 30 seconds, after which more people will hang around if they are interested in the video.

Well-designed content performs better

Short, targeted videos with content targeted to an online audience performs better. Taking a recording of a 1 hour lecture delivered to an in-person audience and posting it unedited may not work. People also tend to prefer simpler introductory content videos.

You will need help

I’ve gotten a lot of help over the years by enlisting other colleagues, including Mike Hoch and Katie Bailey. You can really expand your expertise.

Cross-promotion and consistency are important

When you post consistently, the YouTube algorithm promotes your material and people are more likely to see the content.

Tools are free or inexpensive

Most of the tools you need, like Open Broadcaster Software, are free. You can record free in powerpoint and export movies. It does take a lot of time to make these videos, and it probably takes 3-10 hours to make a 10 minute video.

You can make a profit (but a small one)

Mostly I’m committed to free and open education, but I do get some small revenues from YouTube advertising and Amazon affiliate links. It’s enough to pay for some hosting and minor costs, but I don’t really make money.

There will be haters

People really don’t like my voice and aren’t afraid to say it. I share a few of the most hilarious comments here.

Serious criticisms/Areas for improvement

It’s possible that videos promote a more superficial understanding as opposed to books and articles, but I think we can combat that by having better and higher quality videos. The videos aren’t peer reviewed, but there is room for feedback in comments.

Summary

Thanks for tuning in to this video to learn more about my YouTube and website voyage. If you haven’t already, check out the rest of the website and the whole channel. If you haven’t checked out ASHNR, please check out the meeting sometime!

Tune in next time for additional interesting content and radiology teaching material! Thanks for checking out the site!

Radiology professor tries AI writing tool to create material for website

Posted on by Brent Weinberg, MD

Radiology professor tries AI writing tool to create material for website

Wondering where all the junk on the internet comes from? Apparently it is written by computers using artificial intelligence! Well, at least that’s what the folks over at jasper.ai would like for you to believe. According to this company, they are using AI to help you write materials for your blog or website to drive traffic your direction. At the very least, they promise they will make it easier for you.

People have been promising that computers were going to take over radiology for at least the past decade, and as far as I can tell there has been very little progress. However, most of this is about image interpretation and this is the first time I’ve seen a product claim that it can do writing for you.

As the owner of learnneuroradiology.com and producer of a lot of educational content, I was wondering what this would mean for someone who creates highly specialized content like myself. I figured this might be halfway decent for a generic interest blog or website, but I didn’t think it would be very good for subspecialized material like radiology and specifically neuroradiology.  

Introduction to the product

I started by taking a look at their introduction video, where they make a lot of claims about how much faster they can create content and show you a brief example. Like all promotional material, it definitely makes big promises, including that they have analyzed 10% of the internet. There are testimonials and everything. I feel like this tells us a lot about the internet that most of it is being written by a bot.

It took a little bit to set up a trial. I had to enter the name of my website, some billing information (including a credit card number), and what kind of content I was creating. The full product starts at $49 / month but there is a free trial for 5 days. That’s what I’m taking. Once I finished, I was able to see the full dashboard.

Generic article about Brain MRI

I started with a generic article about Brain MRI to see how it would do with some more general content. After entering some basic information, I got started pretty quickly. It required me to start writing the article before it created some content, but surprisingly it generated some half-way relevant, if overly generic material. With a little bit of guidance and a few clicks, I had created a decent general interest article. My initial impressions were that it was doing ok. It did a pretty decent job on a general article. I give it a “B to B+”.

More specific article about glioblastoma

Now it’s time to give it something a little harder. Glioblastoma. I expected it to perform worse, but it had some surprisingly decent comments about the imaging features and could even differentiate between imaging modalities, like computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging. It could fill in rudimentary although sometimes wrong information about the differential diagnosis and prognosis. I’m not going to lie, this is exceeding my expectations.

Technical article about white matter abnormalities

Finally, I tried an article a little bit more technical about white matter abnormalities. Of all the articles, this one did the worst, but it was still fairly relevant. It was able to come up with some differential diagnosis for white matter lesions and relevant diseases. It did provide a little bit more irrelevant or wrong content than the other articles.

It did make me a little sad that we don’t have more report generation tools that are radiology specific. I feel like a similar tool trained on radiology reports with radiology diagnoses could actually go a long way towards helping me generate differential diagnoses on challenging cases. I’m looking forward to having more tools like this in the future but I don’t feel like this is quite ready for primetime right now, even for writing a website.

Tune in next time for additional interesting content and radiology teaching material! Thanks for checking out the site!

Summary

So what are my final recommendations? I wouldn’t use it for my site, but it is capable of generating some half-way useful content. I expected to be able to make fun of it more, but it exceeded my applications. What is my overall impression: I wouldn’t throw it in the trash. I can imagine it is pretty useful for a generic interest site, but for more specialized applications it does get a little unraveled. It becomes a little repetitive, and I’m worried that it is actually just regurgitating content from other sites. There is a “plagiarism checker” but I was unable to use it because it required an additional fee that I didn’t want to pay.

“What is my overall impression: I wouldn’t throw it in the trash.”

 

It did make me a little sad that we don’t have more report generation tools that are radiology specific. I feel like a similar tool trained on radiology reports with radiology diagnoses could actually go a long way towards helping me generate differential diagnoses on challenging cases. I’m looking forward to having more tools like this in the future but I don’t feel like this is quite ready for primetime right now, even for writing a website.

Tune in next time for additional interesting content and radiology teaching material! Thanks for checking out the site!