Are radiology visual skills one dimension in undergraduate medical education?

Dear Sir

In your recent article, Ravesloot and colleagues provide valuable insight on the assessment of visual skills across a postgraduate radiology training (Ravesloot et al. 2012) and found large differences from the first to the third year of training in one overall dimension.

In this context, we administered an examination at the start of year, with 32 radiologic images in eight body structures to 369 undergraduate medical students from the first to sixth year. Students had to identify for each image the radiologic technique: X-ray (XR), Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Final scores were the percentage of right answers. The anatomy courses comprise 593 classes’ hours along the course and are distributed in two preclinical years (first and second year) and one clinical year (fourth year).

Contrary to the previous study, the confirmatory factor analysis found that the examination had three dimension (XR, CT and MRI), with Cronbach's alphas higher than 0.8.

We found a similar trend for CT and MRI, i.e. in the first year (CT = 41.6; MRI = 41.5) and second year (CT = 44.2; MRI = 42.4) students had few skills increasing significantly at third year (CT = 67.3; MRI = 74.8) and at fifth year (CT = 86.9; MRI = 92.5). However, students had high scores for X-ray since the beginning of the course (first year mean score = 89.8).

We found support for three dimension one for each radiologic technique. Like in the postgraduate training, CT and MRI visual skills differences were large from the first to the third year and in our study also from the fourth to the fifth year. Students were able to identify X-ray since the first year. Nevertheless at the end of the course, students had high visual skills for all dimension.