The Scientific and Medical ART (SMART) database describes itself as a collection of greater than 15,500 high quality illustrations and animations depicting anatomy, physiology, surgery, diseases, conditions, trauma, embryology, histology, and other health science topics. This database contains a large number of illustrations of individual anatomical features and medical conditions and procedures. The concept of this database is an excellent idea, both as a learning tool for students and an educational resource for instructors. This is a database of expert reviewed illustrations where students can supplement illustrations found in texts and those distributed across the web and where instructors can easily find images that will work with their curriculum. A great idea in these contexts, the database is billed by the publisher as being useful for legal professionals and news media professionals as well.
The images, however, typically do not include a highly differentiated set of anatomical features nor do many of the illustrations include labels detailing what elements of the anatomy are in view; where the diagrams are labelled the lack of detail limits their value. Many of the images seem to be duplicative or nearly duplicative, which may prove useful for instructors when choosing just the right illustration for a lecture or a laboratory exercise, but also reduces the number of topics that are treated in the database. The textual titles of the images were descriptive and accurate. Under the heading Interactive are a series of tutorials called projects, showing a lack of thoroughness or thoughtful design. For example, the anatomy of the eye and the anatomy of the brain both have links that highlight anatomical features in adjacent images; some links include balloon captions that describe the feature, but the captions are too brief to fulfil the interactive project's learning objectives and students would be required to jump around different parts of the project. A small collection of medium length encyclopedic medical articles are included within the database as well.
Searching this database is frustrating. There are extremely limited search instructions on how to search and users are restricted to an image type drop down box and one simple search box. Here searching seems limited to using search terms that are combined with a Boolean “and” and the terms are autostemmed. Added to this limitation is that browsing by subject heading is limited to top level general terms. Reasonable help files are not included. At the time of this review users are able to bookmark pages via eleven services. The “You may also want to review these items” viewable from individual image screen does produce a reasonable number of related images. A feature named the Lightbox, allows individuals to collate and save groups of selected images and permits the user to invite others to view their Lightbox.
The SMART database permits authorized users to download images for educational, non‐commercial use, such as use in lectures, presentations, slide shows, non‐public websites, poster sessions, handouts etc. Licenses for commercial enterprises are also available. The educational license on there website permits posting of images on websites that require ID/password authentication and the websites must not be indexed by Google. There are two versions of the SMART database available, a standard version with c. 2,000 images and the comprehensive version with over 15,500 images.
The alternatives to this product come in many different forms and different degrees of usefulness. For example, medical and anatomy texts will have images that may be relevant to their courses, an academic library's online journal collection will have many images that could prove useful, there are many specialized medical image databases on the web, and, of course, internet image search engines can provide many images as long as the user carefully evaluates the source of any found. Another similar database is Images.MD: The Online Encyclopedia of Medical Images (www.images.md/users/index.asp?flag =) which boasts 70,000 images compared to SMART's c. 15,500. While this database is a great concept, the product is disappointing. Its poor quality search and retrieval system, its less than stellar collection of images and the availability of images from other sources make this database, in its current form, not worth recommending.
