Neuroscience technique applied to the medical diagnostic support system

Abstract

Due to the technological evolution in health, the development of software that helps the doctors in his decisions on the diagnosis of the patient has intensified in recent years. However, adherence by doctors in this regard is still small. The literature shows that doctors form a differentiated group of computer users regarding the acceptance of new technologies. This is justified by the fact that they are generally highly time-pressed, dealing with a wide variety of information and vital decisions. In all professions, the decision-making process is present in most everyday situations and it is important to select the best of them. The Decision Support System (SAD) becomes an ally in this process, especially in the area of health in which the Medical Decision Support Systems (SADM) can contribute to better patient care. It is worth remembering that software to support medical diagnosis may present alternative hypotheses, which will broaden the professional's view on information that he may not be currently associating with. An example of this would be the use of a dermatological software that by capturing the image of a spot on the skin may infer the presence or not of the low, medium and high risk, for example, the SKINVISION software available in the market. Prejudice regarding the use of software that supports the medical decisions may affect directly or indirectly the health care for the population. One of the ways to identify whether or not the medical professional has a prejudice in the use of software in their work practice is through neuroscience techniques applied to the use of Implicit Memory Measurement (Implicit Association Testing -TAI), which does not depend on the participant's conscious attention, and their responses are automatic and spontaneous. The purpose of this work is to use the concepts derived from neuroscience to carry out measures of explicit and implicit memory of medical professors and medical students in order to verify the existence or not of prejudices regarding the use of medical decision support software. This paper presents the results of the pre-test applied to specialists, who are doctors who make use of SADM, and medical students who had the discipline of medical informatics, both groups are from the unit of FAPAC / ITPAC -Porto Nacional -TO. The pre-test was performed in order to verify the internal consistency, that is, if the participants of the chosen association words were understood. For the analysis of the results obtained in this work item, the data were stored in MS Excel® spreadsheets and analyzed with the Statistical Software Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS®), version 23.0, for statistical analysis. SPSS® software was used to calculate Cronbach's alpha, a coefficient in order to measure the internal consistency and reliability of the pre-test of this study (FreeIAT). As a result, the Cronbach's alpha value calculated in the pre-test was 0.838 indicating, thus, good internal consistency.