Geisel School of Medicine medical students Faraz Farhadi ’24 and Harun Sugito ’23, along with Professor of Radiology Petra Lewis, MBBS, and Sidak Pannu, MD, have received a Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) Education Project Award to support DartRad. Each year, the professional radiology society provides supplemental funding for new or ongoing education projects through their Education Project Awards, a highly sought grant for investigators in academic radiology.
Founded in 2020 by Geisel students and Lewis as a free radiology curriculum easily accessible to all, DartRad is the only interactive national educational radiology portal by and for medical students, allowing users to explore and contribute to short (less than 5 minutes each) cases via social media.
From multiple choice questions to open answers to image localization, users interact with a diverse set of cases spanning a wide array of radiology topics—the curriculum is based on the Oxford-American Handbook of Radiology by Lewis and Nancy McNulty MED ’95.
“DartRad provides 'bite size' interactive radiology teaching in a form that students enjoy,” Lewis explains. “We have developed more than 200 cases so far; this grant allows us to streamline case production and publication to make the project efficient and sustainable.”
Pannu, lead investigator of this project and steward of the grant, is an award-winning resident educator who recently completed the Interventional Radiology residency program at Dartmouth Health. The expertise he brings to the DartRad team bridges that of Lewis and the student directors.
The award represents national recognition of Sugito and Farhadi’s hard work and will be used to increase the existing substantial catalogue of educational material with additional learning modalities, reach a broader audience, and create a platform for podcasts and lectures.
“As student directors of DartRad for the past year, Faraz and I noted improvements to move the platform forward nationally as an educational tool for medical students interested in radiology,” Sugito says. “Because a lot of the work we do happens in the background, this funding will enable us to streamline that work so we can focus on recruiting more authors and diversifying content on the website to increase the engagement level.”
Sugito’s interest in diagnostic radiology began the summer following his first year of medical school. A research project at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering introduced him to high resolution imaging of the temporal bone—work that led to a 2020 AOA Carolyn L. Kuckein Student Research Fellowship that supported a continuation of that research. He also spent one year as the Robert F. Jeffery Fellow in the Department of Radiology at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Prior to medical school, Farhadi worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a research fellow in nuclear medicine and radiology where he was an assistant investigator for multiple clinical trials—work that produced more than 20 peer reviewed publications. While attending Geisel, Farhadi continues his research at NIH as director of the Dr. Babak Saboury Lab in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center.
“The fact that our proposal was chosen as one of the top-ranked applications demonstrates the importance of DartRad's mission,” Farhadi says. “Knowledge of medical imaging is useful for clinicians in many specialties, not just radiologists, and DartRad is an excellent resource for this. This grant will allow us to adapt our current operation into a multimodal platform optimal for transmitting this knowledge at the level of undergraduate medical education.”
Medical students interested in writing cases for DartRad may contact: Harun Sugito ’23, Harun.R.Sugito.MED@Dartmouth.edu.
Below you can watch a short video of DartRad quiz steps.
For examples of past quizzes, visit: https://www.dartrad.org/pastquizzes.
