Education Outcomes
OpenSpineConsortium is also a medical-education model. The same open, asynchronous framework that produces our datasets turns students with little coding or imaging background into contributors with conference-ready scholarship — an outcome we measure rather than assume.
Self-rated competence, before vs. after OSC
Mean participant comfort, 1–5 scale
Loading survey results…
For program directors & medical educators
Every participant contributes to a live research dataset, builds a reproducible analysis pipeline, and earns authorship on work submitted to a national meeting. Because the model is asynchronous and open-source, it scales across institutions without wet-lab space or one-to-one faculty time as the bottleneck. Participants identified onboarding as the main barrier — a structured, hands-on six-part tutorial series has been added in response.
Published description of the model: Schehr A, Kim J, Schwing G. OpenSpineConsortium: an open-source framework for medical student engagement in computational spine imaging research. Cureus 2026;18(7):e112661. doi:10.7759/cureus.112661