Contribute to IMAIOS and share your knowledge

As healthcare professionals, we believe it's vital to think about training today’s and tomorrow's practitioners. That's why we're always looking to improve the effectiveness of our tools for everyday practice.

We are convinced that by giving you the opportunity to share your knowledge and experience, we can make a real contribution to improving the learning of healthcare professionals, and the care of patients worldwide.

Improving education and training

Knowledge that was once considered relevant to medicine and patient care has become useless, obsolete or even incorrect. Regular adjustments in education are therefore necessary and warranted. Teaching anatomy has undergone major changes to adapt to technological advances and new pedagogical challenges.
Over the last few decades, knowledge of human anatomy has declined considerably in the medical student cycle, due to the development of numerous medical fields more and more focused on biology. The transition to integrated learning, in which anatomy is taught in conjunction with other disciplines such as physiology, pathology, cell biology and even radiology, has also reduced the time devoted to anatomy.
However, the reduction in time and attention given to anatomy in medical courses contrasts sharply with the importance of this anatomical knowledge, universally recognized in the medical community.
In some specialties, particularly surgery, there are serious concerns that the decline in anatomical training has led to dwindling specialized knowledge that needs to be supplemented by postgraduate anatomical training. Gross anatomy is considered an undisputed essential component of the medical curriculum. Anatomical knowledge is also a foundation of medical language, and is therefore necessary for effective communication between healthcare professionals [1].

To compensate for this loss of teaching, we feel it is important to build up a collaborative base of anatomical structure definitions that can become a reference for learners. Our anatomical structure pages contain radiological images and/or illustrations with the structure highlighted on each one, thus linking anatomy with radiology teaching.

Who are our current contributors?

Many of our e-Anatomy users are anatomy teachers or radiologists, and some of them are already contributing to this collaborative database by creating definitions or translations of definitions:

• Muhammad Asim Javaid, MD, Ph.D. Anatomy Education;
• Victor Braun, radiologist ;
• Cristián Uribe-Vásquez, MSc, MBA, PhD. Teaching in human anatomy and radiological anatomy. 

A training course is currently being developed in collaboration with Muhammad Asim Javaid, to provide a better understanding of neuroanatomy.

Cristián Uribe-Vásquez, Professor of Anatomy, has developed a radiology course for anatomy students. He will be delivering this training live over the coming weeks, ending with a presentation of e-Anatomy. Students are located in Central and Latin America.

Would you like to participate? Get in touch!

How do I write a definition on IMAIOS?

Here's a simple guide to creating a definition:

Definition format

Introduction

- The introduction consists of one or more sentences describing the anatomical structure in its entirety. 
- The labeled term should appear in the first sentence, in bold, and if possible in the form "name of the structure (eponym; acronym but not systematic) is a muscle etc.".
- There should be no line breaks or bullet points in this introduction.
- And the size of this introduction should be between 250 and 350 characters (including spaces).
 

Contents of the definition

- The definition should favor a short format. 
- Do not use italics in definitions, even in another language.
- The definition must be specific to the structure. Consider hyperlinking any child or adelphi structures that may derive from the structure, rather than describing them in the same definition. 

Ideally, hyperlink only the relevant structures you cite in your definition (and not necessarily all the structures), and link them only the first time you mention them in the definition. 
You don't have to specifically mention the name of the structure you're quoting.
In a vet-Anatomy definition, it's interesting to compare the animal structure with a similar structure in humans (for comparative anatomy).

Sources/references must be entered in ENGLISH and in VANCOUVER style.

- To do this, you can go directly to PubMed, where you can find all the articles published in the medical or veterinary field. PubMed offers a "cite" button (cf) which allows you to format the references to this article in Vancouver style. All you have to do is copy the proposed text.

=> Arrange sources alphabetically by author's name (and if several references have the same author, arrange them chronologically).
Don't list these sources as bullet points or indents, simply go to the line between each source.

 ⚠️ Always remember to respect the punctuation and spaces specific to this nomenclature.

Contributors

After writing the content of your definition, remember to add, in the following order, First Name, Last Name.
If you do not enter this information, then IMAIOS will be indicated as the default creator of the add-on.

A forthcoming article will detail the specifics for certain structures (notably muscles, nerves, veins or arteries), as well as the nomenclatures to be used for each source category.