How This Curriculum Is Organized
- The site is built like a tree: Sections → Systems → Topics → Pages. Every page lives at one tidy address,
/learn/system/topic/page. - Pages come in flavors (we call them archetypes) — an "approach" page teaches you how to read a study; an "entity" page teaches you one disease. Knowing the flavor tells you what to expect.
- Each page is tagged with a level (Foundation → Med Student → Core → Subspecialty) so you can read at your altitude instead of drowning.
- You do not have to go in order. Start anywhere, follow the cross-links, and let curiosity drive.
Radiology is enormous. If you dumped the whole specialty on a table it would look like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that someone shook violently and then set on fire. So before you read a single chest X-ray, it helps to know how this particular box of puzzle pieces is sorted. That's all this page is: a map of the map.
The big idea: it's a tree, not a pile
Everything here nests in four layers, from widest to narrowest. Think of it like an address. You don't tell someone you live "in the country" — you give them country, city, street, house number. Same here.
| Layer | What it is | Real example |
|---|---|---|
| Section | The biggest bucket — a whole phase of learning | Foundations |
| System | An organ system or theme | Imaging Physics |
| Topic | A cluster of related pages | X-ray & CT Physics |
| Page | One lesson, one MDX file, one idea | Attenuation & Radiographic Contrast |
Read the table top to bottom and you've zoomed from "the entire field of medical imaging" all the way down to "how X-rays get eaten on their way through you." That zoom is the whole organizing trick.
The address bar tells you exactly where you are. A page URL is always three segments: /learn/<system>/<topic>/<page>. So attenuation and radiographic contrast lives at /learn/imaging-physics/x-ray-and-ct/attenuation-and-contrast. If you ever feel lost, look at the URL — it's a breadcrumb trail you didn't have to leave.
The sections, in plain English
The top-level buckets roughly follow the order a brain wants to learn things in:
- Start Here — orientation and how-to-read-anything skills. You are standing in it right now.
- Foundations — physics, contrast, radiation safety, and the universal interpretation basics. The grammar before the poetry.
- Body Systems — the interpretive core, organized by organ system (neuro, chest, abdomen, MSK, and friends). This is where most of your hours will go.
- Subspecialties & Cross-Cutting — peds, nuclear medicine, IR, emergency, oncologic imaging, ultrasound. The stuff that cuts across organs.
- Non-Interpretive Skills — safety, informatics, statistics, professionalism. The boring-sounding things that quietly keep you employed.
- Exam Prep & Pathways — crosswalks to the big exams and guided reading paths.
Pages have flavors (archetypes)
Not every page is built the same, because not every question is the same. "How do I even approach a head CT?" is a different beast from "What does a meningioma look like?" So each page is one of a handful of archetypes, and the archetype quietly sets your expectations:
| Archetype | What you'll get |
|---|---|
| Approach | A step-by-step way to read a kind of study. |
| Entity | One disease: what it is, how it looks, how not to miss it. |
| Physics / Technique | How the machine makes the picture. |
| Don't-Miss | The emergencies — findings that hurt people if you skate past them. |
| Pitfall | The classic traps and mimics that fool everyone at least once. |
| Reference | Quick-lookup pages (like this one) and cheat sheets. |
When you're brand new, lean on approach pages first — they teach you the search pattern. The entity pages make far more sense once you already know how to walk through the study. Trying to memorize diseases before you can read the film is like memorizing restaurant menus before you've learned to drive to the restaurant.
Levels: read at your own altitude
Every page also carries a level label, and this one's a kindness to your sanity. The same topic can be taught shallow or deep, and you get to pick:
- Foundation — absolute first principles.
- Med Student — the must-recognize, "don't embarrass yourself on the wards" tier.
- Core — residency-grade depth, the meat of board prep.
- Subspecialty — the deep end, fellowship-flavored detail.
A medical student cramming for a rotation and a senior resident grinding for boards can stand in front of the same organ system and pull totally different pages off the shelf. Same library, different shelves.
Don't mistake a higher level for "better." A Subspecialty page on prostate MRI is not a smarter version of the Med Student fracture page — it's just aimed at a different reader. Reading above your level too early is the fastest way to feel dumb about something you'd actually understand fine next month. Match the altitude to where you are today.
How to actually move around
Here's the part people overthink: you don't have to read this like a novel. The tree is for orientation, not for marching orders.
The real magic is the cross-links. Whenever a page mentions a concept that has its own page, the first mention is hyperlinked. So you might be reading about pneumothorax, hit the word "attenuation," click it, fall down a two-minute physics rabbit hole, and pop back out smarter. That wandering is encouraged. It's not getting distracted; it's how the web of knowledge actually wires itself into your head.
If you'd like a recommended order instead of free-roaming, that's exactly what the guided routes are for — see choosing your path. And if you just want to start doing the thing, jump straight to how to read any study.
The one thing to remember
If you forget this entire page, keep this: section, system, topic, page — that four-word ladder is the skeleton of the whole site, and the URL always tells you which rung you're on. Everything else is just deciding which rung to grab next. Tripped over a term you don't recognize? The glossary is the front desk.