Background There is expanding need for cardiac ultrasound training for medical students, although most of medical schools do not integrate cardiac ultrasound training into their curricula. Most of residency programs already have some standardized cardiac ultrasound training for residents, but there is no standardized cardiac ultrasound training for medical students. Last year, the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE), which takes a leading role in establishing training for echocardiography, presented the recommended training methods of cardiac ultrasound for medical students with flipped classroom methods which consist of pre-training e-learning, hands-on training, and competency assessment after the hands-on training. But no researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the ASE recommended training methods at this moment. In addition, hand-held ultrasound (HHU) probe which enable us to perform echocardiography just connecting to cell phone, have become commercially available this year. The investigators believe most medical students will have their own HHU probe as well as physicians in ten years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the ASE cardiac ultrasound training methods with applying the training methods to the pre-clinical medical students in University of Hawaii at Manoa using HHU probe.
Methods The investigators will perform a prospective, experimental educational study investigating the learning effects of ASE recommended echocardiography training in pre-clinical medical students on cognitive and psychomotor skill using HHU device, when performing a basic echocardiography on a healthy volunteer.
The investigators will use e-mail, presentations and public posting on bulletin board in University of Hawaii for recruiting participants of 1st or 2nd year medical students. Target sample size is 130 at maximum. After recruitment of participants, first, participants will take a pre-training knowledge assessment and questionnaire on basic cardiac ultrasound (30 minutes) one week before the day of hands-on training. Second, after the pre-training assessment, participants will independently review the 40 minute American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) recommended e-learning module (https://aseuniversity.org/ase/lessons/47) on basic cardiac ultrasound prior to the hands-on training day. Third, on the day of hands-on training, participants will take a pre-training skill assessment and receive hands-on training for basic cardiac ultrasound with a healthy volunteer (HV) (60 minutes). Immediately after the hands-on training, participants will complete a post-training knowledge and skill assessment on basic cardiac ultrasound with a HV and questionnaire about participants' experience (30 minutes). Finally participants will take another post-training knowledge \& skill assessment on basic cardiac ultrasound and questionnaire about participants' experience eight weeks after the hands-on training day to assess retention of their knowledge and skills on basic cardiac ultrasound with a HV (30 minutes).
In this study, investigators plan to use HHU probe, named Butterfly iQ hand-held ultrasound, Butterfly Network, Inc.
The knowledge assessment contains 40 MCQs on 5 basic views. In the skill assessment, participants will be asked to obtain 5 basic views on a HV in 2 minutes per view and the images are to be video-recorded. After de-identification of obtained images, the image quality of 5 basic views will be assessed by three independent blinded assessors using image quality scoring system investigators devised. One of investigators will take a role of a HV for echocardiography throughout this study consistently.
