Clinical decision‐making in restorative dentistry. Content‐analysis of diagnostic thinking processes and concurrent concepts used in an educational environment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Dental practice is affected by variation in diagnosis and treatment planning between clinicians. The process underlying the decisions leading to management of dental caries is poorly understood. OBJECTIVE: To explore diagnostic thinking and identify information used in the diagnosis, management and treatment of caries. SUBJECTS/MATERIALS: 15 senior dental students (mean age, 23.1 years; 66% female) in Mexico City were interviewed using a Simulated Patient Model (SPM). METHODS: The SPM consultation session and its review, aimed at eliciting an introspective recall description of the Diagnostic Thinking Processes (DTP) and the pieces of information (concepts) employed, were transcribed and content-analyzed (CA). CA reproducibility coefficients were 0.53 to 0.64. The cognitive psychology Gale & Marsden (GM) model was used to structure DTP and concepts. Data were analyzed with chi-squared tests. RESULTS: DTP utilization was similar to the original report in endocrinology and neurology cases. A wide variety of concepts were combined with DTP to describe the strategies and information preferentially resorted to while addressing four areas identified in the consultation. CONCLUSIONS: Narrow arrays of concepts of restorative concern (mostly physical features present in/on teeth) were often investigated using DTP 1, 2 and 4 in combination with the use of dental explorers. The heuristics detected link features common to the GM model and to an indirect pattern-recognition model, whereby reliance on visual/tactile concepts facilitates the acquisition of a clinically meaningful image. Non-clinical factors believed to be at play in the application of strategies were not investigated but were controlled for in the SPM.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it