Radiopaedia Blog: Editorial project

With over 10,000 articles, keeping Radiopaedia.org tidy with a consistent style requires constant work by contributors and the editorial board. To kick off 2017 we undertook a quick review of approximately a quarter of all articles to ensure that the title syntax is consistent and helpful. This also involved reviewing and updating our style guide including defining disambiguation article style. 

The team consisted of (in alphabetical order): Andrew Murphy, Ayush Goel, Frank Gaillard, Marcin Czarniecki, Pir Abdul Ahad Aziz, Tim Luijkx, Vincent Tatco and Vikas Shah. 

We reviewed 2598 articles and edited over 600 of them. There are bound to be ones still out there, and new ones every day. 

Upwards and onwards! 

Associate Professor Frank Gaillard is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Radiopaedia.org. He is also an academic neuroradiologist and Director of Research in the Radiology Department of the Royal Melbourne Hospital/University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia.

Meningiomas are a common and important intracranial tumor, with many histological variant, some of which have quite specific imaging features. We thought that this cluster of articles and cases warranted review, as many subtype articles were missing, the main article (meningioma) was a bit disjointed, and many of the cases would benefit from a tidy up. This was a big project but has resulted in a much more comprehensive and polished section. 

Team: Bruno Di Muzio, Ahmed Abd Rabou, Piotr Gołofit, and Frank Gaillard

Expert adviser: David Yousem

Existing articles reviewed / improved: 16

New articles written: 20

Cases reviewed: 262

Existing articles reviewed / improved

Radiopaedia.org already had a number of articles in and around the meningioma topic cluster. Many, however, had been written years ago and had been built upon gradually. Sometimes a good clean up is required. 

Main article: meningioma

This is a long article and has been extensively edited and improved to improve not only the content but also the organization. Additional articles which have been reviewed and in almost all cases improved are: 

• intraosseous meningioma
• cystic meningioma
• intraventricular meningioma
• radiation induced meningioma
• optic nerve sheath meningioma
• microcystic meningioma
• psammomatous meningioma
• rhabdoid meningioma
• white matter buckling sign
• sunburst sign - meningioma
• mother in law sign - meningioma
• dural tail
• CSF cleft sign
• primary extradural meningiomas
• Simpson grade

New articles written

Reviewing the topic also made us realize that we were missing a number of important entities. Specifically many of the histological subtypes, many of which have distinct biological behavior and appearances, were missing.  

• meningothelial meningioma
• fibrous meningioma
• angiomatous meningioma
• secretory meningioma
• metaplastic meningioma
• cartilaginous meningioma
• lipomatous meningioma
• melanotic meningioma
• myxoid meningioma
• osseous meningioma
• xanthomatous meningioma
• lymphoplasmacyte-rich meningioma
• clear cell meningioma
• chordoid meningioma
• atypical meningioma
• papillary meningioma
• anaplastic meningioma
• burnt out meningioma
• spoke wheel sign
• ginkgo leaf sign

Cases reviewed / improved

It turns out we have a fair few cases of meningioma on the site. In fact at the time we started the project we had 262; that number has since no doubt increased. We did our best to go through and improve / tidy up most of them. We also removed a bunch of cases. Some were deleted, most which were not up to scratch were pushed back to draft mode. 

You can look through the most complete cases here. 

What's next?

We will of course be continuing to improve this content, but for now we will move onto new proposed editorial projects. If you are interested in helping out, you don't need to be an editor. Just write to [email protected] and we'll get you started.