Establishment of a clinical thinking ability training database based on artificial intelligence technology (Preprint)

BACKGROUND With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), medicine has entered the era of intelligent medicine, and various aspects, such as medical education and talent cultivation, are also being redefined. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to introduce an application named “XueYiKu”, which incorporates AI and real medical records to provide a new model of clinical thinking training. In addition, application usage classified by 4 levels of difficulties, learning and teaching effect were evaluated by 6 dimensions. METHODS The“XueYiKu” app was designed as a contactless, self-service, trial-and-error system application based on actual complete hospital medical records and natural language processing technology to comprehensively assess the "clinical competence" of residents at different stages. More than 400 teaching cases from 65 kinds of diseases were released for students to learn, and the subjects covered internal medicine, surgery, gynecology and obstetrics, and pediatrics. RESULTS From the app’s first launch on the Android platform on May 2019 to the last version of the “XueYiKu” app updated in May 2023, the total number of users of teachers and students was 6,209 and 1,180, respectively. The top 3 subjects most frequently learned were respirology, general surgery, and urinary surgery. For diseases, pneumonia was the most frequently learned, followed by cholecystolithiasis, benign prostate hyperplasia, and bladder tumor. The app enabled medical students' learning to become more active and self-motivated, with a variety of formats, and realized real-time feedback through assessments on the platform. The learning effect was satisfactory overall and provided important precedence for establishing scientific models and methods for assessing clinical thinking skills in the future. CONCLUSIONS The integration of AI and medical education will undoubtedly assist in the restructuring of education processes, promote the evolution of the education ecosystem, and provide new convenient ways for independent learning, interactive communication, and educational resource sharing.