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How the Brazilian College of Radiology took Atualiza worldwide with Collective Minds

Actualiza

Industry

Hospitals and Academia

Challenge

Challenge: Atualiza, CBR's hands-on imaging meeting, could not move fully online without losing what defines it: hundreds of radiologists opening and reviewing the same high-resolution DICOM cases live. Lectures, cases, and registration sat in separate systems.

Results

Results: CBR moved Atualiza onto a single integrated platform. Participation grew roughly fourfold to over 1,200, with up to 400 radiologists reviewing large studies simultaneously in one live session.

Key Product

Teaching

1 200+
Participants this year
4x
Growth in participation
400
People opening large, complex studies simultaneously

"The collaboration has been transparent, respectful, and genuinely collaborative. We felt supported throughout as we scaled, and we learned a great deal from the Collective Minds team, about leadership, work ethics, and culture. It has been a model of international cooperation."

Mauricio Zapparoli

Scientific Director, Brazilian College of Radiology

Collective Minds CBR planning Meetings

Actualiza

Each year, the Brazilian College of Radiology (CBR) brings radiologists all over Brazil together for Atualiza, its annual education meeting. Atualiza was never designed as a lecture series to watch from a distance. Its purpose is hands-on: a participant studies a case, opens the imaging, and works through it alongside expert faculty. The imaging is not an illustration of the lesson; it is the lesson.

For years, that experience was delivered in person. CBR ran as many as 15 sessions at once across different capital cities, reaching around 300 radiologists in total. The model worked, but geography set its limits. Radiologists outside the host cities had little practical access, and coordinating parallel events across the country placed a steady operational load on the team.

As the event has continued to grow, it has expanded its faculty beyond Brazil. While its in-person editions featured exclusively Brazilian speakers, the transition to an online format opened the program to leading international radiologists, who now participate as guest speakers and panelists.

The challenge: take it online without losing the imaging

When in-person events were no longer possible, CBR faced a question larger than it first appeared. The goal was not simply to move Atualiza online. It was to run a hands-on imaging meeting, for radiologists spread across not just Brazil but the whole world, in which everyone could open and review the same case in perfect detail live, along with the presenting speaker.

That is a demanding thing to do well. High-resolution radiology education runs on typically large, data-heavy DICOM studies that have to be hosted, shared, and actively delivered and interacted with by hundreds of people at once. The early online setup could not carry that. Lectures sat in one system, case material in another, and registration ran through a separate platform that participants found difficult to use. The pieces existed, but they did not move together, and the imaging, the core of Atualiza, was the hardest part to deliver at scale.

CBR did not need a video tool. It needed an imaging platform that placed high-resolution, modern imaging topics directly to the audience.

The turning point

The partnership with Collective Minds resolved that. Rather than connecting separate tools, CBR moved Atualiza onto a single integrated teaching platform, one place where any participant can easily open the corresponding high-resolution case directly via the built-in DICOM viewer. The path from registration to hands-on case review became continuous.

Mauricio Zapparoli, Radiology Professor and Scientific Director at CBR described the shift as a clear change in how the meeting could be run. The imaging was no longer something to work around; it sat in the same system as the teaching, ready to use.

The platform also held up at scale. Supported by Amazon Web Services, it allowed as many as 400 people to open large, complex studies simultaneously in a single live session, the largest hands-on online event of its kind. Equally important, it preserved what defines Atualiza: live discussion between expert faculty and participants, with everyone reviewing the original case data at full diagnostic resolution, replicating the experience of a modern radiology department, while the images were automatically made safe for educational use.

 

The outcome

Moving Atualiza onto one platform kept the meeting running online and extended its reach well beyond what physical venues allowed:

  • Participation grew roughly fourfold, from around 300 across fragmented in-person sessions to over 1,200 this year.

  • Imaging at scale: Cloud-based infrastructure supporting hundreds of users opening and working with large studies in real time.

  • A clearer path in: the difficulties tied to the earlier sign-up process were resolved, and participant satisfaction improved.

  • The hands-on experience preserved: live expert-participant discussion and immediate case analysis remained central, now within reach of radiologists anywhere in Brazil, and also global experts and participants.

  • World Expert speaker contributions and involvement are made possible from any location in the world, as they can easily log in and teach without travel.

"Atualiza has evolved over many years through the dedication and vision of successive CBR leadership teams, whose efforts laid the foundation for the program we have today. Partnering with Collective Minds changed how we run the meeting. We moved from fragmented systems to a single platform, where a participant watches the lectures, and open the case in the DICOM viewer — all in one place. For a hands-on meeting like Atualiza, that makes the difference.", says Mauricio Zapparoli, Scientific Director, Brazilian College of Radiology.

"The success of Atualiza reflects the dedication and vision of successive CBR leadership teams over many years. Their work established the strong educational foundation and reputation the meeting enjoys today. Building on that legacy, our partnership with Collective Minds enabled the next phase of its evolution. We moved from fragmented systems to a single platform, where participants can watch the lectures and open the corresponding case in the DICOM viewer—all in one place. For a hands-on meeting like Atualiza, that integration makes a meaningful difference."

— Mauricio Zapparoli, Scientific Director, Brazilian College of Radiology

Looking ahead

What began as a response to circumstance has become the foundation for how CBR delivers high-quality education. With participation rising and many programs competing for radiologists' attention, the CBR is refining how it formats Atualiza, alternating the full, 23-course program with more focused editions built around its most popular subjects, keeping niche content manageable while sustaining engagement year over year.

The platform brings real-world, anonymized medical imaging cases directly to radiologists anywhere in the world, enabling participants to review high-resolution studies and appreciate the subtle imaging findings that are critical for early disease detection. During the event, attendees have the unique opportunity to learn alongside internationally recognised experts, reviewing the exact same case resolution in real time as if they were sitting together in the same reporting room. By overcoming the challenges of sharing the large datasets generated by modern imaging systems, the platform delivers an immersive and collaborative learning experience without the need for international travel, reducing both cost and environmental impact.

The result is a truly global educational event on a scale that promotes earlier diagnoses, better clinical skills and decision-making, and ultimately improved patient outcomes.