Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest, Bucharest, 060042, Romania.
Faculty of Medicine, University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Carol Davila" Bucharest, Bucharest, 050474, Romania.
BMC Med Educ. 2024 Sep 10;24(1):984. doi: 10.1186/s12909-024-05938-6.
Medical students gain essential skills through hospital training and internships, which complement their theoretical education. However, virtual patient platforms have been shown to effectively promote clinical reasoning and enhance learning outcomes. This study evaluates a web-based platform designed for learning clinical reasoning in cardiovascular diseases, detailing its functionalities and user satisfaction.
The Virtual Patient platform presents medical students with clinically valid scenarios, encompassing stages such as patient description, anamnesis, objective examination, presumptive diagnosis, health investigations, treatment planning, complications, differential and final diagnoses, and prognosis. Scenarios are generated either automatically or manually by professors, based on labeled and annotated clinical data. The Virtual Patient contains two types of medical cases: simple scenarios describing patients with one pathology, and complex scenarios describing patients with several related pathologies. The platform was evaluated by a total of 210 users: 178 medical students, 7 professors, and 25 engineering students, using questionnaires adjusted for each evaluation round to assess satisfaction and gather feedback. The evaluation by medical students was performed in four rounds, each round corresponding to successive enhancements of the platform functionalities and addition of new cases, with a total number of 1,098 evaluation sessions.
The platform was evaluated at different implementation stages, involving simple and complex scenarios for various heart diseases. The majority of students found the platform very useful (82.58%), with significant appreciation for its features and functionalities, for example the dialogue module supporting natural language interactions in Romanian and English or the feed-back obtained during interaction. Professors highly valued the platform's flexibility in scenario generation, real-time feedback provision, and data management capabilities. They appreciated the possibility to provide feedback and score student performance in real-time or after the session, though some professors suggested improving the explainability of the scores.
The Virtual Patient platform enables medical students to virtually replicate hospital interactions, diagnose patients, and plan treatments in clinically valid scenarios for cardiovascular diseases. User evaluations demonstrated high satisfaction and appreciation for the platform's features. Future work will focus on expanding medical cases, enhancing the dialogue module, improving scenario generation for complex cases, and extending the synthetic data generation component to produce additional types of medical investigations.
医学生通过医院培训和实习获得基本技能，这与他们的理论教育相辅相成。然而，虚拟患者平台已被证明可有效地促进临床推理并提高学习成果。本研究评估了一个专门用于学习心血管疾病临床推理的网络平台，详细介绍了其功能和用户满意度。
虚拟患者平台向医学生呈现临床有效的情景，涵盖患者描述、病史、客观检查、初步诊断、健康调查、治疗计划、并发症、鉴别诊断和最终诊断以及预后等阶段。情景由教授根据带标签和注释的临床数据自动或手动生成。虚拟患者包含两种类型的医疗案例：描述一种病理学的简单情景和描述多种相关病理学的复杂情景。该平台共由 210 名用户进行了评估：178 名医学生、7 名教授和 25 名工程学生，每个评估轮次都使用了针对不同用户类型的调查问卷，以评估满意度并收集反馈。医学生的评估共进行了四轮，每一轮都对应于平台功能的逐步增强和新案例的添加，共进行了 1098 次评估。
该平台在不同的实施阶段进行了评估，涉及多种心脏疾病的简单和复杂情景。大多数学生认为该平台非常有用（82.58%），对其功能和特性评价很高，例如支持罗马尼亚语和英语自然语言交互的对话模块或在交互过程中获得的反馈。教授们高度评价了该平台在情景生成、实时反馈提供和数据管理能力方面的灵活性。他们赞赏可以实时或在会话结束后提供反馈和对学生表现进行评分的可能性，尽管一些教授建议提高评分的可解释性。
虚拟患者平台使医学生能够在心血管疾病的临床有效的情景中虚拟复制医院互动、诊断患者并规划治疗。用户评估显示了对该平台功能的高度满意度和赞赏。未来的工作将集中于扩大医疗案例、增强对话模块、改进复杂病例的情景生成以及扩展合成数据生成组件以生成其他类型的医学检查。
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