From videos to CD-ROMS, educators are offering every possible medium to radiologists attempting to keep up with fast-paced changes and innovations. Without question, the Internet is becoming a very important vehicle to relay substantial current information to radiologists. Getting to it in a timely fashion can be a problem, however. Even with the help of the best search engines, you can spend valuable time finding what you want.

I have assembled some tips to help in your search for current information, CME, and answers to clinical questions. The list is by no means comprehensive, but it reflects my experience surfing the Web for useful radiology sites.

Residents seeking National Board-like teaching cases should bookmark the best teaching sites and share them with one another. Unfortunately, the Internet is not yet sophisticated enough to make finding good teaching file sites easy. While many sites offer teaching files, the user has no way of knowing how comprehensive or useful a site is until after committing considerable time to following links. As with many queries, different search engines offer different results. You can spend more time searching for sites than actually learning from them.

Variation in the way Web sites are designed and presented is wide. Some sites allow users to take cases randomly, while others show the diagnosis as hypertext -- making it difficult to "take unknowns." Sites may offer great images but little discussion. On many sites, particularly with radiographs, the pertinent findings are hard to see. The Web shows the findings of CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds better than it shows conventional radiographic findings.

Two good places to start are radinfonet.com and auntminnie.com. Both offer links to many good teaching file sites.

Don't forget to check out http://www.acr.org/frames/f-job.html when you want to take a break from learning to look for that perfect radiology position. This job-listing site of the American College of Radiology is one all residents should become familiar with.

For academic queries, check out Medline from the National Library of Medicine, which is free to use and quite quick. Radiologists who write academic papers already know how much easier literature searches have become on the Web. What used to take an afternoon now takes about three minutes.

The news is promising for the practicing radiologist looking to keep up with the latest developments in radiology technology, management, and policy. diagnosticimaging.com, auntminnie.com, and radinfonet.com are all excellent sources. They are updated frequently and have information relevant to the daily practice of radiology. This is an area in which the Web excels.