Musculoskeletal Anatomy Education: A Survey of North American Medical Programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Postgraduate data reveal that most physicians lack adequate anatomical knowledge and clinical confidence when practicing musculoskeletal (MSK) medicine. Curricular data from nationally accredited medical programs clearly indicate that the total time dedicated to gross anatomy instruction has decreased over recent decades. However, little information is available regarding the MSK anatomy learning environment across accredited medical programs in North America. The purpose of this study was to document the current state of preclinical MSK anatomy education across North American medical programs. A survey was sent to all 14 English-speaking Canadian and 135 of the 158 American accredited medical programs. The survey had a 100% response rate from Canadian programs and 43% from American programs. The results indicated that the mean time spent learning preclinical MSK anatomy varied widely across both Canadian (29.8 h ± 13.7, range 12-60, median 29, mode 12) and American (50.8 h ± 46.2, range 2-280, median 35, mode 30) programs, most of them integrating anatomy learning into the clinical learning environment (56%). All but one program reported using cadaveric-based instruction (99%) and the majority taught radiological correlates (94%) and surface anatomy (71%) within their curriculum. Diverse modes of instruction were used by all programs, but didactic lectures remained the most frequent form (89%). While a variety of learning resources were used to support student learning, the type of resource varied significantly, Canadian programs most commonly providing a "curriculum-specific" notes package (86%) and American programs most commonly requiring an anatomy atlas (84%). Summative and formative methods of evaluation were used by most programs (96%), final written examinations (79%) and ongoing in-course evaluation (81%) being most popular. The results serve to document the current state of preclinical MSK anatomy education within nationally accredited allopathic medical programs and to illustrate the wide variability of the learning environment. Future research should be directed at establishing consistent standards for preclinical MSK anatomy education and investigating the long-term effects on knowledge retention and clinical confidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".