Flashcards for medical school
Medicine is the hardest case for any flashcard system: enormous volume, dense source material, and diagrams that only make sense visually. These are the parts of DecksMD that exist for it.
Medical students were the reason spaced repetition went mainstream, and they are also the group most poorly served by writing everything twice. You already take notes. The problem is turning several hundred pages a week into cards without that becoming a second full-time job.
Your lecture notes are already the deck
Tag a note with #decks and every heading at your chosen level becomes a card front, with
the text under it as the back. A lecture write-up you would have made anyway becomes
reviewable the moment you save it.
The practical effect is that correcting your understanding corrects your cards. When a consultant contradicts something in week nine, you fix the sentence in your notes and the card is fixed. There is no second copy quietly teaching you the wrong thing until finals.
Headings above your chosen level become breadcrumb context rather than cards, so
Cardiology > Heart failure > Management travels with the card and you always know which
system you are in.
Anatomy: image occlusion
Image occlusion is built in. Draw boxes over a diagram in an interactive editor and each becomes a card that hides one label.
Two details that matter in practice. Masks are stored as percentage coordinates, so a diagram occluded on a laptop is still correctly masked on a phone. And each mask can carry its own markdown or LaTeX answer, so a box over a structure can reveal more than just its name.
There is also a simpler variant — an image followed by a numbered list — when you want the speed of typing over the precision of drawing.
Textbooks and scanned handouts
PDF ingestion reads a document’s outline and shows you its chapters, so you tick the three you were set this week rather than feeding it 900 pages.
Scanned material is the harder case, and it is the one medicine actually has: photocopied handouts, photographed slides, lecture notes captured on a phone. Those go through OCR first, including maths rendered as LaTeX. Each transcribed page is cached as its own markdown file in a folder you choose, keyed by content — so renaming or moving the PDF does not force a re-transcription.
OCR for scanned PDFs is the one part that requires DecksMD Pro. Text-based PDFs extract without it, and card generation works free with your own API key.
Volume control
The failure mode in medicine is not making too few cards. It is waking up to 800 due.
- Per-tag profiles set separate daily new and review limits, retention targets and scheduling per subject. Anatomy and pharmacology do not have to run at the same pace.
- A global daily study cap sits on top of the per-deck limits.
- The future-due forecast in statistics shows what is coming over the next weeks, so a pile-up is something you see arriving rather than something you discover.
- Retention targets are per profile. Holding your exam subject to 95% while background reading sits at 85% is a legitimate way to spend your finite review budget.
Coming from Anki
You almost certainly have an Anki collection. You do not have to abandon it.
The importer takes a standard .apkg with decks, cards, media, tags
and review history, mapping the scheduling onto FSRS-6 so a card on a 60-day interval
stays there. Anki cloze becomes ==cloze==, including inside $…$ maths. Anki image
occlusion becomes native occlusion. Media-heavy decks are split across capped files so no
single note becomes unopenable.
It is additive and never touches your .apkg, and DecksMD exports back to
Anki too.
A common arrangement: keep the big shared decks in Anki, and let DecksMD handle the material you are actively writing up. See DecksMD vs Anki for the honest comparison.
Before exams
Exam decks run a graded, one-sitting session over any deck — multiple choice from task lists, type-in for headings and tables, cloze as blanks, with an optional time limit and pass score. Crucially they do not touch your FSRS scheduling, so a mock paper cannot wreck the spacing you have spent a term building.
Cram does the same for a single deck the night before, and is equally scheduling-neutral.
More guides
- Flashcards for engineering students
- Flashcards for law students
- Flashcards for language learning
- Flashcards for exam preparation
Or start with what FSRS actually is, or how DecksMD compares with Anki and the Spaced Repetition plugin.
Common questions
Can I import my existing Anki med decks?
Yes. DecksMD imports an Anki .apkg export with decks, cards, media and review history intact, so cards resume on FSRS-6 rather than restarting. Large media-heavy decks are split across capped files automatically. Many people keep big shared decks in Anki and use DecksMD for their own lecture notes.
Does it handle anatomy diagrams?
Yes. Image occlusion lets you draw boxes over a diagram and turn each one into a card. Masks are stored as percentage coordinates so they stay correct at any screen size, and each mask can have its own markdown or LaTeX answer.
What about scanned handouts and photographed slides?
PDF ingestion reads a document's outline so you can pick only the chapters you need. Scanned pages, slide decks and photographed notes go through OCR first, including maths as LaTeX. Each transcribed page is cached as its own markdown file in your vault.
How do I stop the daily review count spiralling?
Per-tag profiles set separate daily new and review limits, so anatomy can run at a different pace to pharmacology, and there is a global daily study cap on top. The future-due forecast warns you about pile-ups before they arrive.
Try DecksMD
Free and open source. Install from Obsidian's Community Plugins, tag a note you have already written, and review it a minute later.