A Study on Brain-based Knowledge Model for Dentist’s Clinical Decision Making

Abstract Background The expertise of dentists is very important since it improves the quality of dental services provided to patients. This study analyzed the characteristics of the decision-making process and confirmed dentists' electroencephalography(EEG) characteristics by measuring their cerebral activity during clinical decision making. Methods This study was performed in the following two projects: (1) A qualitative study of clinical decision making in a clinical scenario, (2) An analysis of differences in cortical activity of experts and novices through EEG. Results In the 1st study, this study found that 'confirmation of the patient's chief complaints', 'oral examination', and 'radiography reading' steps, which showed the most prominent differences in the experts' and novices' decision making, were set as the major steps of dentists' clinical decision making. In the 2nd study, the experts' and novices' cortical activities were measured through a 32-channel EEG. In task 6, which had the lowest accuracy of diagnoses made by the experts, the brain activities in both groups were higher than in other tasks. Conclusions This study aims to link learning and the cortical functions activated during dental experts' decision making in order to present learning directions for brain-based clinical decision making to develop experts.