As a part of a major reform of the medical curriculum in Germany, the national catalogue of learning objectives is being revised with the focus shifting from theory-based learning to teaching practical skills. Therefore, we conducted an online survey to answer the question, which practical skills are essential in anesthesia. Participants were asked to rate the relevance of several skills, that medical students should be able to perform at the time of graduation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The field of pain medicine was established as an obligatory subject area of medical schools in Germany in 2016. No prior study has evaluated the effects of this curricular change on students' competences in the field of pain medicine.
Objective: The aim of this study was to find out to what extent the introduction of the additional subject "pain medicine" positively influenced the students' acquisition of competences measured via a self-assessment.
Background: The transfer of classic concepts of competency-based medical education into clinical practice has been proven to be difficult in the past, being described as partially fragmented, misleading and inadequate. At the beginning of training, novice doctors commonly feel overwhelmed, overloaded and exposed to extreme time pressure. The discrepancy between expected and actual clinical competence of doctors at the start of their speciality training jeopardizes patient safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The SARS-CoV‑2 pandemic has been a major challenge for graduate education. Teaching had to be digitalized within a very short time. This also affected the areas of anesthesiology, intensive care, emergency, pain and palliative care at the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Leipzig.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial anxiety disorder patients suffer from excessive anxious responses in social interaction leading to avoidance behavior and social impairment. Although the amygdala has a central role in perception and processing of threatening cues, little is known about the involved networks and corresponding dysfunctions in social anxiety. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the functional connectivity network of the amygdala in patients with social anxiety disorder and to identify regions that might influence amygdalar reactivity via modulatory pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrently, most studies that employ dynamic causal modeling (DCM) use random-effects (RFX) analysis to make group inferences, applying a second-level frequentist test to subjects' parameter estimates. In some instances, however, fixed-effects (FFX) analysis can be more appropriate. Such analyses can be implemented by combining the subjects' posterior densities according to Bayes' theorem either on a multivariate (Bayesian parameter averaging or BPA) or univariate basis (posterior variance weighted averaging or PVWA), or by applying DCM to time-series averaged across subjects beforehand (temporal averaging or TA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResting-state data sets contain coherent fluctuations unrelated to neural processes originating from residual motion artefacts, respiration and cardiac action. Such confounding effects may introduce correlations and cause an overestimation of functional connectivity strengths. In this study we applied several multidimensional linear regression approaches to remove artificial coherencies and examined the impact of preprocessing on sensitivity and specificity of functional connectivity results in simulated data and resting-state data sets from 40 subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF