Clinical Guidelines Acquisition, Representation and Simulation for Medical Education

Artificial Intelligence has the potentiality to innovate education in many areas, including medicine. Since 1996 we work in the area of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, developing GLARE (Guideline Acquisition, Representation and Execution), a decision support system, within a long-term project for the design of advanced AI supports for the management of Computer-Interpretable Clinical Guidelines (CIGs). Recently, we have started to investigate the adoption of AI and CIG systems for medical education. In this paper, we highlight goals, research plan and methods of a two-year project started on May 2nd 2023, funded by Fondazione Compagnia San Paolo and Fondazione CDP, involving a University, an Hospital, and a dissemination company, and devoted to AI-based medical education. The project will address different tasks related to the adoption of medical knowledge for medical education, including knowledge acquisition, representation and reasoning (in the form of simulation and conformance evaluation). The Italian melanoma guideline will be considered as a case study. In the last six months of the project, a course will be held for a cohort of general practitioners of the Alessandria territory, distinguishing between a class adopting the developed AI-based tools and a control class. The learning results of the two classes will be compared.