Winners of the Case of the Week, 2002

This is the time of the year when I again have the pleasure to congratulate everyone for their tremendous efforts in solving and providing the Cases of the Week.

Incredibly, overall 184 respondents got at least one answer correct. There are several hundreds more who made valiant attempts but were not close enough. I know the "Good idea... but not correct :(" is very depressing for some, but.. hey it is just a test to learn !

By the way, I was in a recent meeting where I too was quizzed (after a long flight and little sleep) and I too got one of those infamous Good idea... but not correct :( !

This year I had divided the groups in more subcategories. The reason for that was that some felt intimidated to compete against the champions of past years. So I put the champions in a special category for themselves. This allowed the champion some break too, since it is not always possible to sustain the amount of effort needed to solve those cases year after year.

In the winner for the physician category (149 respondent had at least one correct answer) we have this year:

Raul is long time supporter of www.thefetus.net/. Initially he was very shy fearing that his English was not sufficient (it is better then mine by the way, just that Raul is more perfectionist then me !). He progressively contributed many of his cases and we have all enjoyed his careful images and documentation Wes Cormick 13 cases

Wes is one of the joys of my emails. He has an incredible sense of humor, and he has sent many emails that have become classics around here. Aside from his good humor he is a fine diagnostician, probably one of those who has the best sense of interpretation of the small clues that I drop in the case of the week. He is also a fine photographer and has an astute observer. He once greeted me as I came out of an elevator. And I was puzzled by how he knew who I was: "You have a great big tag with your name on it !" Thomas Schramm 11 cases

Thomas is a quiet respondent. I have met him at a few meetings and he is simply provides good answers with a quite smile. Thomas has not only gotten many cases this year, but he has been active for many years already and has improved his score: Congratulations to him ! Ruggero Trevisan 9 cases   Ruggero is another quiet and dedicated respondent who interestingly had already scored 9 cases last year. Boopathy Vijayaraghavan 8 cases

The next category, are the 17 sonographers all from the USA this year:

In the category of former physician winners we find of course many familiar faces. I will simply list them and their scores:

And finally in the former sonographer winner category we have the indisputable champion of this year: Fabienne Bigi with 15 correct answers. Another great success is Cyrethia McShane with 7 cases.

There are a few interesting observations to derive from these results:

1. The top winner for this year is not only a sonographer, but also a sonographer in a country where sonographers are not the rule !
2. To my non-statistician eye it is not obvious to me that overall one category (sonographer/MD) has a clear advantage in points over the over.
3. 13 answers seemed to have been the magic number this year. And I realized that I was starting to forget my rule of a "impossible-case-followed-by-a-difficult-case rule" and was posting just impossible cases and depressing readers. I will try to alternate better in the next year.

Again I wanted to thank everyone for having had the privilege to share this exercise. I hope everyone has learned much from this cases, I am very indebted to all those that made the effort to submit those cases. Some cases come from countries in which currently, intellectual achievements should be far behind the daily worry of simply surviving. These physicians in particular deserve our appreciation for their will power.

The following are those that found the exact answer to the primary diagnosis in the case of the week. The names in boldface have contributed some of their cases: thank you !