Submit a Case of the Month!

It's easy: Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Find an interesting case
    This can be a good example, a rare or unexpected finding or just plain pretty.

  2. Capture images
    Use a digital camera or film camera. If you use the latter, most photo processing centres can turn 35mm slides of negaives into digital format. Perhaps your lab already has a film scanner.

  3. Prepare the images for web publication
    Remember that computer monitors have a limited resolution, (typically 1280x1024 pixels) so there is no point in sending images bigger than that. Try to keep images to 1000x1000 pixels maximum. You can use an image editing program such as Adobe Photoshop to crop and/or resize your images, and adjust contrast and colour balance if necessary. There are open source programs (free to download and use) available out there, such as "The Gimp" that are perfectly adequate for this task.

    Save your images in JPEG format and use the following naming convention: "cotm[mmyy_n].jpg" where 'mmyy' represents the month and year and 'n' represents the order of the image in your presentation. For example, "cotm0105_1.jpg" for the first image for the January 05 case and so on. Please use lower case letters in your filenames.

  4. Write it up
    Look at our previous cases to get ideas about how you should approach this. Bear in mind that all the text fomatting, etc. is handled automatically by stylesheets on the website so just save your work in plain text format ( as a .txt file) with anotations such as '[image 1 here]" to tell us where you want the pictures to go.

    MAKE SURE THERE IS NOTHING IN THE TEXT THAT COULD IDENTIFY A PATIENT.

  5. Send it!
    Email your text and files to cotm@cytology.org.nz or if you are restricted to the size of emails that you can send then save the files on cd and post it to:

  6. Claim your CPD points!

Please bear in mind that the website is maintained by unpaid volunteers. Please stick to the guidelines above to keep their workload to a minimum, otherwise there is no guarantee that your case can be published. If you need futher advice then feel free to email us.

Keep the cases coming!