Auscultation tutorials

We're coming up on auscultation quizzes in Physical/Clinical Diagnosis, so I've been sorting through tutorials online. I need lots of repetition for tasks that involve memory-based auditory discrimination, so the more the better.

• Blaufuss -- some very nice tutorials with clinical scenarios, visual depictions and testing. I looked at "Heart Sounds Quiz" in particular.
  
• Cardiology site has a very extensive site of heart sounds, including many pathological.
  
• a basic set of lung sounds from RALES
  
• basic set of heart and lung sounds from 3M
  
• nice set of lung sounds from UC Davis, the one from which I made an iFlash deck of flashcards
  
• and lastly, if you own Bates Guide to Physical Examination, there are updated versions of HeartSounds available, most importantly one that runs kindof-natively in OS X. (I was really impressed that I was able to get the author's email from the readme on the CD, email him, and get a response with the updated app info directly from him within a day. Thanks, Dr Pitts!)
  

All in all, the winner is Blaufuss: Heart Sounds Tutorial.

Oh, and an amazing database of ophthalmology images.

OS X: Flow charts and schemas

In Clinical Diagnosis we started off having to make a bunch of clinical diagnosis decision-making schema. People used Powerpoint, Word, OmniGraffle, and other disasters-fests; the situation was dire! Thankfully someone in my group had Visio, so it was up to him to produce our Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency schema.

Hands down, the best flow chart / schema software is yEd Java Graph Editor. It's available for just about every OS, so there's finally something useful in this blog for Windows users.

The image in this post is the giant master schema I made for one of our exams -- don't copy it because there are mistakes in it that I've caught since then, and it's not logically sound, but admire its vastness! -- there are nice PNG (image) and PDF exports (so you can share it with people who don't have the software and print it anywhere), it can print across multiple pages (very handy for giant messes like that one), it has snap-to grids, you can set the default node properties (including size, shape, background and text color), and you can have it do all sorts of fancy graph analysis and redistribution. The arrows are flexible, the labels are flexible, and it's absolutely the best tool I've found.

There are some user interface quirks that are frustrating, especially for novice users. Clicking once creates a new node, but clicking an existing node isn't enough to edit it -- you have to hit F2 to edit the label, whether that's the node label (the text inside) or the arrow label (the text accompanying the label). If you have a Mac laptop and your F2 is truly a function key (like screen brightness), you either have to hit Function-F2 to get the F2 yEd is expecting, or you have to override the setup in the keyboard preferences in the System Preferences (Keyboard & Mouse :: Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features). Overall, you can be very productive with yEd after 5-10 minutes of basic acclimation, and it's well worth the time investment.

The other tool I found was Gliffy, but that was mostly because they have cool room layout modes where you can drag couches and bookcases around, and as someone who's tried everything from construction paper to Photoshop to mock up a room, that's very cool.

Have you been using yEd? Any tips for readers? Is there some other software you've found productive? Please comment!

OS X: Flash cards and quizzing

Once a software engineer, always a software engineer. And once stubborn -- well, still stubborn. I tend to have an idea, code it poorly, work on it for a long time, then look around and find someone else has done it already, and way better than I ever would.

As is the case with flash cards / quizzing applications. A few years ago I wrote a PHP/MySQL web site for flash cards and shared it with my Anatomy & Physiology class. It was clumsy, web-based, I was the only one who could add cards, but it worked for me. It wasn't the solution I needed for med school though, so I finally looked around for OS X software to do the job.

I found two:

iFlash is $12 and has some excellent features -- your cards can have multiple "sides" (which is handy given that there's more than one thing we need to know for each herb, for example), and they can have embedded sounds, which means that I just made a deck of cards incorporated the lung sounds I downloaded from somewhere. There's a free 30-day trial, which I'm still working from. [iFlash review and iFlash download]

Genius is free and has a cool quizzing algorithm. One of the features I liked about the tool I wrote was that you had to get questions right more than once in order to have them deemed "known," and the more you got them wrong, the more you had to get them right to get back in the black. Genius has a similar idea going and seems like an excellent tool. [Download Genius]

What's your impression? Are flash cards helpful for you in learning? Do you find added value from computer-based flash cards instead of that huge deck of 3x5s fraying in your back pack?

New blog

Welcome to the new ND Student Usefulness blog. There are lots of blogs out there for conventional medical students, but I don't know of many for naturopathic medical students.

I'm hoping this blog will be a good resource for software I find useful, web sites or articles that are informative, blogs I read consistently, books I loved -- basically, all the stuff I come across by being online constantly that I want to share with my classmates more efficiently than just telling everyone I run into on the way to lunch.