Musculoskeletal ultrasound: an effective tool to help medical students improve joint inflammation detection?

The objective of this study was to evaluate whether musculoskeletal (MS) ultrasound (US) can be useful in helping medical students to detect joint inflammation through physical examination.

The study was performed by two groups of four 6th year medical students. None had received any previous training in the clinical examination of joints or the use of ultrasound. Students were put through a 5-session training programme on the clinical detection of either knee [group 1] or metacarpophalangeal (MCP) [group 2] inflammation. After an initial training session on physical examination of normal and inflamed joints, the students examined 170 joints from 41 patients attending the hospital outpatient clinic in 4 separate sessions. The same joints were assessed for synovitis with US with the ensuing data compared to that of the students and analyzed for concordance with Cohen's unweighted kappa.

In total 60 knees [group 1] and 110 MCP [group 2] were evaluated. The agreement between the presence of arthritis detected by the students in the four sessions and the presence of synovitis detected by US improved from the session I to sessions III with a marked improvement in the last session.

MSUS may be an effective technique for helping students to acquire the ability to detect joint inflammation.