Assessment of Medical Students' Knowledge of Imaging Methods for Bone Sarcomas

Cancer is a leading cause of death in Brazil and worldwide. However, Brazilian medical education fails to include oncology as an essential topic. This creates a gap between the health status of the population and medical education. Bone sarcomas fall into both the group of malignant neoplasms and rare diseases and are thus doubly influenced by misinformation. To assess medical students' knowledge of imaging diagnostic methods for bone sarcomas. A cross-sectional, quantitative study was undertaken by obtaining the responses of medical students to a questionnaire containing radiographic images and questions about the radiological aspects of bone sarcomas. The categorical variables were compared using the chi-square test. The level of significance was 5% for all the tests. SPSS software version 25.0 was used for the analysis. A total of 325 responses were collected, with 72% of the participants having no interest in oncology and 55.6-63.9% not knowing how to diagnose a periosteal reaction on bone radiography. Only 11.1-17.1% of the students correctly interpreted the radiographic image of osteosarcoma. Medical students fail to correctly interpret images of bone sarcomas. It is important to promote oncology undergraduate education in general and to include the approach to bone sarcomas in this context.