E1857. Radiology Medical Student Didactic Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Building Virtual Core and Advanced Curriculums
Authors
Gabriel Virador;
George Washington University Hospital
Sean Herman;
George Washington University Hospital
Murwarit Rahimi;
George Washington University Hospital
Fatimeh Nasri;
George Washington University Hospital
Farnoosh Mohebzadeh;
Shiraz University of Medical Sciences
Ramin Javan;
George Washington University Hospital
Objective:
Assess medical student perceptions on radiology clerkship education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Develop a virtual radiology curriculum for the general radiology rotation at our institution and design a testing system to evaluate students’ abilities to identify key radiological findings in core subspecialties.
Materials and Methods:
A survey was sent to 17 medical students who completed the radiology rotation at our institution during the 2023 academic year to assess perceptions on the current educational experience. After identifying a need for more rigorous training, selection criteria were developed to construct an online video-based curriculum. An extensive search of available resources was performed, including evaluation of content from professional societies (e.g., ARRS, AUR), universities, and radiology websites (e.g., Radiopedia). Topics were divided into 4 core subspecialties: body, chest, musculoskeletal, and neurological imaging. Videos had to concisely teach basic imaging concepts and cover common diagnoses in each subspecialty; only open access materials were selected. After the validity and quality of selected videos were approved by radiology attendings, a final list of video links was compiled. When possible, timestamps of the most relevant video sections were embedded for ease of use.
Results:
Survey results revealed that 82% of students agreed that having access to an online curriculum could lead to more meaningful interactions with radiology attendings during the rotation, with over 70% of students preferring online didactic teaching over in-person lectures. As such, a curriculum was designed with a content duration of approximately 6.5 hours and was posted to our institution's blackboard page for secure access. A pre- and post-clerkship test including 30 image-based, multiple-choice questions derived from the core curriculum was designed and will be implemented in future cohorts of students to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum. Furthermore, an advanced curriculum containing videos from the subspecialties of nuclear medicine, breast, and pediatric imaging was prepared as supplementary content that would not be tested.
Conclusion:
Due to the high workload of attending radiologists, as well as a new normal of hybrid systems post-pandemic to minimize person-to-person contact, medical student education can often fall to the wayside. As such, having a virtual radiology curriculum has many potential benefits such as avoiding overcrowding in lecture halls, allowing students to learn at their own pace, and improving their time spent on the clerkship. Our survey results revealed that nearly all students agreed that access to an organized, virtual curriculum would have been beneficial. Thus, we worked to identify video content available from different sources to give medical students a strong foundation for understanding imaging basics within radiology. We are designing a testing system as a means of quantitative analysis to gauge the effectiveness of this teaching methodology, with the goal of ultimately sharing our curriculum with the radiology community.
