First-year medical students at a historically black university in the nation’s capital are getting a deep introduction to the basics of radiology.

The school is the Howard University College of Medicine. The program incorporates multiple learning modules in medical imaging while overcoming “the limitations of resources including funding, faculty and curricular time,” according to an article published online June 19 in Anatomical Sciences Education, the journal of the American Association of Anatomists.

Describing the fruits of their successful interdepartmental collaboration, anatomist James Wilson, PhD, radiologist Andre Duerinckx, MD, and co-authors emphasize their program’s reliance on self-study and peer-to-peer interactions.

The team’s aims in launching the program included building students’ proficiency using free DICOM image-viewer software and teaching them to identify normal anatomy in medical images.

“An effective collaborative relationship between a radiologist and anatomist was necessary to develop and implement the program of anatomic–radiographic instruction,” the authors point out.

The curriculum steps students upward along five tiers, according to the journal article. Students are first exposed to anatomy through standard dissections, then study annotated radiographs from atlases. Next they take a radiology quiz open to group discussions, conduct small-group studies of clinical cases with diagnostic images and, finally, get tested on their image-interpretation skills.

In the program’s pilot period, students worked from medical images preloaded on their personal computers to take all their quizzes and tests, “mimicking the approach by which radiologists analyze medical images,” the authors report.

“Graduating physicians in all subspecialties have an increased need for competency in radiology, particularly since the use of diagnostic imaging continues to grow,” Wilson et al. note.

“In addition to stimulating student support of a new teaching initiative,” they write, “the strengths of Howard’s program are that it can be introduced into an existing preclinical curriculum in almost any medical school with minimal disruption, it requires few additional resources to implement and run, and its design is consistent with the principles of modern education theory.”