RadiSurg—Need of Implementation of an Interdisciplinary Surgical-Based Radiological Anatomy Course

TL;DR

This study shows that an interdisciplinary surgical-radiology seminar improves medical students' anatomical knowledge and prepares them for residency.

Contribution

The novel contribution is the implementation and evaluation of an interdisciplinary surgical-based radiological anatomy course for medical students.

Findings

Students showed significant improvement in anatomical knowledge after the seminar.

Fourth-year students outperformed final-year students post-seminar.

97% of final-year students found the seminar useful for residency preparation.

Abstract

At the beginning of medical school, anatomy courses usually take place on cadavers. Mostly several years of medical training without any further clinically applied anatomical lessons are following. Therefore, we decided to review and refresh students’ knowledge of anatomy with special regard to surgical clinical settings.

An interdisciplinary surgical-based radiology seminar for final year students in their internship year and fourth year students during their surgical semester was performed starting with a surgical-radiological-anatomical knowledge exam. Afterwards, clinical cases were discussed in detail including for example videos from operations and corresponding radiological imaging by specialists from both surgery and radiology. At the end of the seminar, the same knowledge survey and an evaluation questionnaire were carried out.

Both final year students and fourth year students showed a significant increase regarding the knowledge questions after the interactive interdisciplinary seminar (
p 0.001). In addition, fourth year student’s post-seminar results were significantly higher than post-seminar results reached by final year students (
p 0.001). Ninety-seven percent of final year students perceived the seminar as useful preparation for the first year as a resident.

In summary, this study demonstrates the value of implementing a clinically applied anatomy refresher into the medical curriculum to increase students’ knowledge and better prepare them for their residency.

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