YouTube as a Source of Information on Echocardiography: Content and Quality Analysis

YouTube (YouTube, LLC, San Bruno, CA, USA) is an easily accessible and increasingly popular source of information on health-related issues. This study evaluated the scientific content and quality of English-language echocardiography videos posted to this Internet platform.

For this study, 583 videos were identified and evaluated following a YouTube search using the keyword 'echocardiography' in July 2020. A total of 92 videos were included in this study following the application of the study exclusion criteria. Both video quality and scientific content were evaluated based on the DISCERN score, global quality score, content score, and total quality score (TQS), which was calculated by adding the scores of the three aforementioned scoring systems.

The median duration of the included videos was 315 seconds (interquartile range: 173-852 seconds). The median number of views was 33046 (interquartile range: 7445-89012). Twenty-four (26.08%), 43 (46.73%) and 25 (27.17%) videos, respectively, were stratified into the following three groups based on TQS values: group 1 (5-7 points), group 2 (8-11 points) and group 3 (12-14 points). The values of views (median: 45072), video duration (median: 474), power index (median: 80250) and popularity (median: 34) were significantly higher in group 3 than in the other groups. The duration that a video was online was statistically significantly higher in group 1.

The results suggest that YouTube is an important tool for easily sharing health-related information and disseminating it to large audiences. It can be concluded from the growing interest in videos with scientific content and the high quality scores recorded that YouTube offers accurate and quality information about echocardiography.