Hardin Medical Library has recently begun applying tags to images from UIHC (University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics) -example images from the Dermatology Department and the College of Dentistry.

Sometimes I feel like I have been accidently recruited into a large team building scavenger hunt exercise when I am asked to look for a good medical image online. I have previously mentioned how I think tagging medical images online would be one way to possibly help organize and retrieve good medical pictures. However, I have seen little development in this area, which is a little surprising to me. The only reason I can think is that many medical images are located in pay databases such as images.MD which wouldn't take too kindly to having there images tagged, displayed, and freely. But what also is a little surprising is that images.MD doesn't allow people to tag images. You can save images to your account but you can't tag them with your own words or notes. I personally think that would be a helpful feature.

Why should we stop at tagging only our personal and fun photos on sites like flickr? Tagging could make finding medical images much easier. What would be cool is if there was a site similar to flickr only dedicated to medical images.

Labels: Social Software, Tagging, Technology