First Year Medical Students, Personal Handheld Ultrasound Devices, and Introduction of Insonation in Medical Education
Open accessAbstract
Background: Ultrasound education has been provided to students in medical schools within and beyond the United States. A formal experiment with use of personal handheld ultrasound equipment by all first-year medical students has not been reported. Employing insonation (an application of ultrasound) at the personal leisure by medical school freshmen enables self-directed learning throughout the academic year. Methods: We describe a peer-led ultrasound curriculum with handheld devices. The students' perceptions were gathered through quarterly Likert-style questionnaires, and the differences in the categories were tested using Analysis of Variance. Results: The response rate was 58.5% for the first survey (n = 32), 56% (n = 30) for the second survey, and 62.3% (n = 33) for the final survey, respectively, with an average response rate of 58.9%. At the baseline survey, overall agreement was observed for enhancement on performance (62.5%) and interpretation (56.3) of ultrasounds, understanding (68.8%) and learning of anatomy (61.3%), ease (78.1%), comfort (59.4%) and benefit of incorporation of insonation in the medical school curricula (all p-values < 0.001). Neutral response (38.7%) or disagreement (38.7%) was observed when assessing the effect of the integration in medical curriculum on specialty choice (p < 0.01). These trends remained constant over follow-up with the exception that the perceived benefit for integration of insonation into the longitudinal curricula (p < 0.05) increased significantly over time. Majority of disagreement was observed regarding current access to the personal ultrasound devices (38.7%) (p < 0.001). Conclusions: The introduction of insonation through personal handheld ultrasound devices in the first-year medical school curriculum was received enthusiastically by students, with the majority of respondents finding the devices both easy to use and a valuable aid to improving their understanding of the three-dimensional anatomy.
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There are already reports of students receiving individual portable ultrasounds with AI-driven software to help advance their education.
“There are already reports of students receiving individual portable ultrasounds with AI-driven software to help advance their education [18,19].”
From Needs, Challenges, and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education Curriculum (2022) · cites this paper as [18]
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- Authors
- Ireson, M., Warring, S., Medina-Inojosa, J. R., O’Malley, M. T., Pawlina, W., Lachman, N., Narula, J., & Bhagra, A.
- Affiliations
- Mayo Clinic (US)
- Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bhagra, Anjali
- Venue
- Annals of Global Health
- Publisher
- Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
- Published
- 2019
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 123-123
- ISSN
- 2214-9996 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6798782
- OpenAlex
- W2980581674
- Cited by
- 37
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5
- FWCI
- 4.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Annals of Global Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine › Ultrasound in Clinical Applications
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Innovations in Medical Education
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Anatomy and Medical Technology
- Keywords
- handheld ultrasound, insonation, ultrasound training, first-year medical students, self-directed learning, student perceptions, anatomy learning, longitudinal curriculum
- MeSH terms
- Self-Directed Learning as Topic, Anatomy, Curriculum, Education, Medical, Undergraduate, Humans, Practice, Psychological, Surveys and Questionnaires, Ultrasonography
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