Abstract
Objectives
Medical expertise manifests itself by the ability of a physician to rapidly diagnose patients. How this expertise develops from a neural-activation perspective is not well understood. The objective of the present study was to investigate practice-related activation changes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as medical students learn to diagnose chest X-rays.
Methods
The experimental paradigm consisted of a learning and a test phase. During the learning phase, 26 medical students were trained to diagnose four out of eight chest X-rays. These four cases were presented repeatedly and corrective feedback was provided. During the test phase, all eight cases were presented together with near- and far-transfer cases to examine whether participants’ diagnostic learning went beyond simple rote recognition of the trained X-rays. During both phases, participants’ PFC was scanned using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Response time and diagnostic accuracy were recorded as behavioural indicators. One-way repeated measures ANOVA were conducted to analyse the data.
Results
Results revealed that participants’ diagnostic accuracy significantly increased during the learning phase (F=6.72, p<0.01), whereas their response time significantly decreased (F=16.69, p<0.001). Learning to diagnose chest X-rays was associated with a significant decrease in PFC activity (F=33.21, p<0.001) in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal area, the frontopolar area and the frontal eye field. Further, the results of the test phase indicated that participants’ diagnostic accuracy was significantly higher for the four trained cases, second highest for the near-transfer, third highest for the far-transfer cases and lowest for the untrained cases (F=167.20, p<0.001) and response time was lowest for the trained cases, second lowest for the near-transfer, third lowest for the far-transfer cases and highest for the untrained cases (F=9.72, p<0.001). In addition, PFC activity was lowest for the trained and near-transfer cases, followed by the far-transfer cases and highest for the untrained cases (F=282.38, p<0.001).
Conclusions
The results suggest that learning to diagnose X-rays is associated with a significant decrease in PFC activity. In terms of dual-process theory, these findings support the notion that students initially rely more on slow analytical system-2 reasoning. As expertise develops, system-2 reasoning transitions into faster and automatic system-1 reasoning.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Henk Schmidt for the suggestions he provided for the first draft of the paper. I would also like to thank Gerald Tan for the materials and Juliana Koh for her assistance in collecting the data for the study.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Author contributions: Authors state no conflict of interest.
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Competing interests: Authors state no conflict of interest.
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Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individuals included in this study.
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Ethical approval: Ethical approval was granted by the University Institutional Review Board.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/dx-2021-0104).
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Reviews
- Fujirebio Lumipulse SARS-CoV-2 antigen immunoassay: pooled analysis of diagnostic accuracy
- Potential prognostic value of miRNAs as biomarker for progression and recurrence after nephrectomy in renal cell carcinoma: a literature review
- Consensus Paper
- A call to action: next steps to advance diagnosis education in the health professions
- Opinion Papers
- Narrowing the mindware gap in medicine
- From principles to practice: embedding clinical reasoning as a longitudinal curriculum theme in a medical school programme
- Is body temperature mass screening a reliable and safe option for preventing COVID-19 spread?
- Original Articles
- Investigating cognitive factors and diagnostic error in a presentation of complicated multisystem disease
- “Sick or not sick?” A mixed methods study evaluating the rapid determination of illness severity in a pediatric emergency department
- Evaluation of feedback modalities and preferences regarding feedback on decision-making in a pediatric emergency department
- Emergency medicine physicians’ perspectives on diagnostic accuracy in neurology: a qualitative study
- The impact of medical scribes on emergency physician diagnostic testing and diagnosis charting
- Automated identification of diagnostic labelling errors in medicine
- How patients describe their diagnosis compared to clinical documentation
- Learning to diagnose X-rays: a neuroscientific study of practice-related activation changes in the prefrontal cortex
- A clinical reasoning curriculum for medical students: an interim analysis
- Improvements and limits of anti SARS-CoV-2 antibodies assays by WHO (NIBSC 20/136) standardization
- Letters to the Editor
- From the amyloid hypothesis to the autoimmune hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease
- What we cannot see in virtual diagnosis: the potential pitfalls of telediagnosis related to teamwork
- Virucidal effects of mouthwashes or mouth rinses: a world of caution for molecular detection of SARS-CoV-2 in saliva
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- Congress Abstracts
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