ABOUT US

OCAD originated in the late 1990s when Phillip Tirman began MSK case sharing using email. The platform was relatively new at the time and well-suited for sharing cases amongst ex-visiting Radiology and research fellows affiliated with UC San Francisco. Our name, OCAD, is attributed to an original participant, Kyung Suh from Daegu, South Korea who began contributing an interesting case almost every day, using the subject line “OCAD-One Case A Day”. That is when and how OCAD officially began.

From roughly 2006 through 2011 the email list was managed by James Linklater and, subsequently by his partner, Simon Dimmick of Sydney, Australia. It was Simon who converted the cut-and-paste email thread to the google group list serve that exists today. During that time, OCAD transitioned from being primarily an interesting MSK case sharing forum to a go-to resource for diagnostic consultation among the participants.

In 2011, Bao Do (of Stanford University) created and launched the xrayhead OCAD website which was our first online home with a searchable image archive. Shortly afterwards, Hilary Umans joined OCAD and began contributing cases while frequently inviting diagnostic assistance. During that period of rapid growth in membership, she became an active administrator of the site.

In 2018, Leon Lenchik conceived of a different kind of non-hierarchical, intimate MSK Radiology meeting, with content contributed and program fully organized and run by OCAD participants. That very successful, Inaugural OCAD Live 2019! meeting took place in March 2019 in Scottsdale, AZ. Sadly, subsequent events planned for March and June 2020 in Los Angeles and Stockholm were upended by the COVID19 pandemic.

In 2019 Behrang Amini assumed the mantle of OCAD webmaster. Along with Hilary they have overseen a period of rapid expansion, having registered our 1000th member in 2020. They worked with Ross Bialowas and Jeremy Kogan to develop this new OCAD website, which will create an automatically archived, searchable database of cases posted through the google group. It will also serve as the portal to free, on-demand videotaped collaborative case conferences (in cooperation between OCAD and the MSK Imaging group of Rio de Janeiro) and a new OCAD-hosted multidisciplinary lecture series on diverse topics to be given by our clinical colleagues.

In 2020 the world has been forced to live and work together virtually as we have been physically isolated. This is exactly what OCAD has been doing for a long time. In doing so, OCAD has morphed into a very large, free, international, volunteer run, online MSK imaging community that is a forum to share interesting cases for the purpose of education, academic interest and diagnostic support.  Not bad for something that started as a simple email chain.