The Academy publishes de-identified teaching cases submitted by members. A case is worth publishing when it changed how the treating team thought, not when it is merely unusual — the rare diagnosis nobody will meet again teaches less than the common one that was nearly missed.
What makes a case publishable
- A real decision point. A moment where competent clinicians would have disagreed, or where the obvious answer was wrong.
- A transferable lesson. Something a reader can apply to a different patient next month.
- Honest reporting. Cases with poor outcomes, and cases where the initial reasoning was mistaken, are more useful than clean successes. They are published without judgement.
- Adequate documentation. The images and traces that support the account.
De-identification — read this before you submit
Every submission must be fully de-identified before it leaves your institution. This is the submitting clinician’s responsibility, and it is checked again on receipt, but a case that arrives identifiable is rejected rather than corrected.
- Remove the name, hospital number, address and any national identifier.
- Give an age band rather than a date of birth, and a season rather than an exact date where the timing is not clinically essential.
- Strip the DICOM header. This is the step most often missed. Patient identifiers persist in the metadata of angiographic and echocardiographic files even when nothing is visible in the image itself.
- Check the corners of every image and trace for a burned-in name or number.
- Remove anything that would identify the patient in combination — an unusual occupation alongside a small town, for instance.
Obtain patient consent where your institution requires it, and follow your local research or clinical governance policy. The Academy publishes on the understanding that this has been done.
What to send
- Presentation and the history available at the time.
- Examination findings and the initial working diagnosis.
- Investigations, with the diagnostic feature indicated on the image.
- The decision point, stated as the choice you actually faced.
- What was done and why, including reasoning that proved wrong.
- Outcome and follow-up.
- Three or four teaching points, anchored to guideline positions or named trials.
- Your name, degrees, role and institution as you want them published.
How submissions are handled
Send your case through the contact page, marked for case submission. Every case is read by a member of the Academic and Scientific Committee described on the committee page. You will hear back within three weeks with one of three outcomes: accepted, accepted subject to revision, or declined with the reason given. Editing is limited to clarity and structure; the clinical content is not altered without your agreement, and you see the final version before publication.
Accepted cases are published with attribution to you and your institution in the case library or as a full worked case in the case studies. Single striking images may run as the image of the month. Authors are invited to present their own case at the relevant weekly discussion session.