Signs article structure

Signs are numerous in radiology and typically relate to a specific appearance or feature that is reminiscent of an object. The aim of a named sign is to help recognise or understand a specific imaging appearance (e.g. racing car sign of corpus callosal dysgenesis). The most important signs are those that help radiologists recognise important and otherwise non-obvious diagnoses (e.g. sail sign of radial neck fractures or Mt Fuji sign of tension pneumocephalus).

Signs should be published and widely recognised in the radiology literature. Importantly, signs are not individual cases which happen to have a feature that resembles an object. For these, we have a special place: Rorschach radiology.

Title

Many signs are named using unusual terms that give no clue as to what they relate to. To make this more contextual, the context of the sign should be included in parentheses. This may be a part of the body, or a condition, or a system. Which you choose will depend on the sign, but should be as precise as possible (i.e. if a sign relates to only one condition, then the context should be the condition, whereas if the sign is more general, the context may be a region or even a system).

e.g. 

• sunburst sign (meningioma)
• bird's beak sign (oesophagus)

Structure

The structure of a signs article should be similar to any other short article, and usually, do not require subheadings. Often they can be illustrated with a photo or diagram depicting the object which the sign is named after, to help with visual recall. These images should either be taken by the contributor or sourced from appropriate sites with compatible licenses (see online resources for more info). 

References

As with all our articles, it is important to reference a peer-reviewed journal article or textbook. Read more about references.