The Art of Medicine: Applying the Visual Thinking Strategy to Radiology

The purpose of this project was to develop a formal visual arts training curriculum and evaluate if there was improvement in the observational and descriptive skills of first- and second-year medical students for radiologic images. Materials and methods: A demographic survey and an initial pre-test of 12 radiologic images were administered asking an open-ended question to describe the image and to identify the abnormality in their own words. Three virtual one-hour sessions of visual thinking strategy (VTS) training occurred, and an immediate post-test and a six-month post-test were administered, each with images different from the pre-test, as well as a final questionnaire. All tests were independently graded by two graders with a previously established grading rubric. Differences in scores were analyzed using paired T-tests.