Check Lists for Anatomy Learning by Images

In recent years there has been a gradual restructuring of anatomy teaching strategies throughout the world, towards a more clinical orientation of the subject. To accomplish this, the basic theoretical information and cadaveric working is now complemented with the study of clinical cases and medical imaging. The information that can be obtained from the last ones is often so abundant that an effective and tidy learning becomes difficult. Many medical specialties use "checklists", as those routinely used in aviation, to ensure that the complexity of the task does not impede to remember every detail. Checklists have also been used in medical education, including anatomical dissectors courses, with good results. Their utility for learning anatomy through medical images has not been investigated yet. The aim of this work is to investigate whether the use of checklists can improve the recognition of normal anatomic structures using medical imaging. We have randomly selected 108 students belonging to the Third Normal Anatomy Department, School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Checklists for each practical lesson were distributed by the web. Every student had access to normal images in the classroom, supervised by an assistant, but the use of the checklists was optional. Students were separated in two groups depending on whether the checklists were used or not, the latter was considered as a control group. We performed two separate evaluations in the first and the second third of the course, in which 15 structures were asked to be identified in normal Rx, CT and MRI. Scores were compared between the group using the lists and the control group, employing a Student's t test and considering as statistically significant p ≤ 0.05. Only 37 students chose to use the checklists. The average score in this group was 9.85 (65.66% correct answers), while the control group obtained 5.95 (39.66%): a statistically significant difference (p = 0.0002). No significant differences in performance between the first and second evaluation was found (p = 0.31 and 0.56 for those using and not the checklists, respectively). These data show that an active and daily use of checklists can be an effective teaching tool to optimize the teaching of anatomy using medical images.