Infectious disease images on the World Wide Web.

Abstract

Infectious diseases (ID) physicians are often in need of medical images to enhance their teaching, research, and clinical practice. We explored the Internet for Web sites with images that would be useful to ID physicians. A total of 24 sites were included for review. Of these, 10 sites were broad in their scope and included images of bacteria, parasites, viruses, and/or fungi. In addition, 4 sites reviewed were specific for fungi, 4 sites were specific for viruses, and 6 sites focused on parasites. The number and size of images, copyright restrictions, and fees were noted for all sites. The authors gave each site a subjective navigation and layout score. Features of the sites, including microscopy images, laboratory images, clinical images, clinical vignettes, medical illustrations and/or clip art, medical illustrations of life cycles, slides of educational material, radiographs, and animation or video, were also described. A variety of image resources are available to the ID physician.