Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists

Web Site Review: Heart Surgery Forum

Reviewer: Olivier C. Wenker, M.D., DEAA

The University of Texas

MD Anderson Cancer Center

Houston, TX

owenker@mdanderson.org

This is basically a surgical site but it also offers some topics of interest to the cardiovascular/thoracic anesthesiologist. The Heart Surgery Forum is the official publication of The International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery. Webmaster of the site is Mark Levinson from the Providence Medical Center in Seattle. The site is composed of a Cardiothoracic Multimedia Journal (peer reviewed), a discussion group, a Learning Center, case reports, news about meetings/jobs, and links to other relevant sites. The online journal currently contains two articles per issue. They are peer reviewed by an editorial board. The articles are presented in a layout of three frames. The upper frame contains the navigation bars, the middle frame the article itself, and the lower frame the references. The middle frame (the most important part of the page) is not large enough and has to be adjusted each time by the user for easier reading. The so-called "Scrub Sink" is an e-mail discussion group where surgeons talk about their cases and ask their colleagues for their opinion or answer questions from lay persons. The "Learning Center" contains medical terminology and simple descriptions of cardiovascular/thoracic procedures for non-medical audience. Both, the "Very Cool" section and the link to "Monster Cases" present interesting case reports from the field. The "Cool Cases" were not updated recently (last updates in March 97) but offer links to other related Web sites. A nice feature is that the author adds the approximate size of images and text to the titles of the "Monster Cases", allowing the user to estimate download times. Image quality throughout the site is excellent. However, this is at the cost of large file size and long download times. Some reports take as long as 5 minutes and 46 seconds to download on a 28.8 modem. An animated logo on the left upper corner of most pages has a file size of 320 KB and unnecessarily delays downloads of interesting pages. The site got several awards in the past and is quite easy to navigate. An internal search engine facilitates the search for articles of interest. A link to an external medical search engine is offered for free but it becomes quickly evident that this site would like you to register and sign up for additional services which are not free. In summary, the heart surgery forum offers a lot of valuable information for lay persons and professionals. The image quality is excellent but requires too much time to download. Using so-called thumbnails (small size copies of the real picture with a direct link to the original image) could solve this problem. Members of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists will certainly enjoy some of the presented "Monster Cases".

The URL (URL = uniform resource locator = address on the Internet) of this surgery-related Web site is http://www.hsforum.com .

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