1. Project Summary:

We will soon produce a series of short videos for publication on the World Wide Web. These informational videos, intended for parents and their children who desire an interactive method of learning about medical procedures that their children will soon be facing, will be aimed at a sixth grade reading level to be accessible to both children and their parents in hospitals, doctors offices, and in the privacy and convenience of their own home. Currently, various radiology departments maintain web pages that utilize text and limited graphics to communicate this information.

Video and audio will be used to enhance the experience of using our web site. At this time, to our knowledge, there is no video or audio anywhere on the web that delivers this content.

Typically, internet-friendly movies have been used primarily as filler material for more standard text-driven web sites. For this project, we intend for the videos themselves to be informative and enlightening. An on-screen narrator will deliver content to the viewer. The narrator's presentation will be aided by graphics and cutaways to relevant material shot in the hospital rooms. Child actors and real doctors will dramatize our procedures for the benefit of the audience. Interviews with real doctors, nurses, and technicians will be integrated into the final product to provide a sense of the staff's professionalism and sensitivity. The ultimate aim of the videos is to capture the warmth and friendliness of Pediatric and General Radiologists around the world. Text alone cannot meet this need.

The videos will be shot in miniDV format, a high-quality video format used by professionals throughout the industry. They will be edited and compressed for publication on the web with a non-linear digital editing suite available for this production. Once edited and compressed for downloading, the videos will be backed up on disk and "mastered" to a linear tape. This ensures that they can be recovered and reformatted as the requirements of the internet change over time. They may also be compressed for different venues such as VHS and CD-ROM, depending on the demands of the viewing public.

If sufficient funds are available, we will go to great lengths to make this site accessible to hearing and sight impaired users. This entails producing extra versions of the videos with captions and providing users with the option of downloading and printing the complete spoken script. If additional funds are available, we will use them to translate additional versions of the videos into other languages. This will help make the site accessible to parents and their children across the world.

New Year Video and Web Design features a good example of captions can be integrated into the final output of a video.

The pilot project will be a depiction of a typical CT scan. Once completed, each additional video will cover a distinct subject. Currently, the topics are expected to include:

1. CT Scans (Computerized Axial Tomography)
2. VCUG (Voiding Cysto - Urethogram)
3. Upper GI Seres
4. Barium Enema
5. Intussusception Enema
6. Ultrasound
7. Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scan
8. Nuclear Medicine
9. Use of Sedation
10. Radiology quided biopy or abscess drainage or minimally invasive biopy

2. Project Purpose

Parents are anxious to know what will happen when their children need to undergo a radiology examination at their hospital or outpatient radiology imaging center. They worry and they ask questions. Moreover, they often realize that their children may not react well to a test for which they are unprepared. Some of the tests that the pediatric radiology department perform may be "invasive" and uncomfortable for the patient.

Pediatric Radiologists are sensitive to parents and their childrens' needs. We are searching for new and better ways to provide information to parents and children that is both informative and reassuring.

The World Wide Web is an ideal place to launch medical information for patients because it fulfills three essential criteria:

• It is easily available to the public without fee.
• The content can be controlled by the user. They can slow it down, speed it up, and revisit the parts that interest them.
• By its very nature, it utilizes multimedia: a combination of print, graphics, video, and audio.

Preparing videos to be downloaded from the web has been a successful venture for both commercial and non-profit companies. In recent years, as internet connections have grown faster and multimedia capable computers have become more prevalent than ever, the capacity for video on the web to reach a wide audience has increased tremendously. With an educational research grant, the possibilities to benefit the community with this project are infinite. We will not only enhance our reputation for innovation and communication excellence. We will also make our procedures easier and less painful for our youngest patients.

3. Project Budget

See current budget.