Free Procedure Guides for Pocket PC/Windows Mobile and Palm

Two years ago, a colleague of mine and I made several procedure guides illustrating central line placement and thoracentesis with step-by-step photos:

Central Line Placement - A Procedure Guide

Central Line Placement with Ultrasound Guidance - A Procedure Guide

Thoracentesis - A Procedure Guide

These photo guides proved very popular and are currently used for teaching purposes by residents at Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University/St. Vincent, and are linked in Wikipedia among several other web sites.

Eight months ago, I got an email from Andrew Schechtman, a Clinical Instructor at Stanford University School of Medicine and the founder of MeisterMed, a popular PDA portal for medical references. Andrew wanted to know if I was interested in adapting the procedure photo guides to PDA and distributing them for free. The original idea behind the guides was that they should be free and used by residents and physicians all over the world, and his suggestion to adapt them for PDA fitted that idea perfectly. I thought about it but somehow never found the time to do it.

Anyway, the procedure guides for PDA are now available for free from MeisterMed:

Central Line Placement (with and without ultrasound guidance).
A Chapter in MeisterMed's Procedure Series for PDA.
V. Dimov, B. Altaqi, 2/20/2007.
Click to download (size: 3.7 MB).

Thoracentesis.
A Chapter in MeisterMed's Procedure Series for PDA.
V. Dimov, B. Altaqi, 2/20/2007.
Click to download (size: 1.6 MB)

The guides themselves are free but they need the iSilo program for Pocket PC/Windows Mobile or Palm to work. The full version of iSilo is required to see the images beyond the trial period and that version costs $ 19. The guides are just like Microsoft Word documents -- you need to have MS Word installed on your computer in order to see the documents. Similarly, you need iSillo installed on your PDA to be able to see the photo guides.

Procedure guides are part of the MeisterMed Procedure Series which will be adding more titles in the near future.