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BackgroundThe internet allows patients to easily look for health information. However, how Chinese patients with breast cancer use the internet has rarely been investigated, and there is a scarcity of information about the influence of internet use on survival. ObjectiveThis observational study aimed to investigate the details of online medical information searching by Chinese patients with breast cancer and to determine whether internet use has any survival benefits. MethodsPatients who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at Peking Union Medical College Hospital between January 2014 and December 2015 were enrolled. We obtained information on their internet-searching behavior and gathered data from the patients’ medical and follow-up records. The associations between internet use and other clinic-pathological factors were analyzed. A Cox proportional-hazards model and the Kaplan-Meier method were used for disease-free survival (DFS) analyses. ResultsA total of 973 patients with invasive breast cancer who underwent definitive surgery took part in the study. Among them, 477 cases (49.0%) performed web-based breast cancer information searching before the initial treatment. A multivariate logistic regression analysis suggested that web-based breast cancer information searching was significantly associated with younger age (odds ratio [OR] 0.95, 95% CI 0.94-0.97, P

Objective To investigate the impact of dynamic adaptive teaching model on surgical education. Methods Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we adopted dynamic adaptive teaching model in the Department of Breast Surgery, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, which divided the whole curriculum into several individual modules and recombined different modules to accommodate to student's levels and schedules. Meanwhile, adaptive strategy also increased the proportion of online teaching and fully utilized electronic medical resources. The present study included quantitative teaching score (QTS) recorded from January 2020 to June 2020, and used the corresponding data from 2019 as control. The main endpoint was to explore the impact of dynamic adaptive teaching model on overall QTS and its interaction effect with trainer's experience and student category. Results Totally, 20 trainers and 181 trainees were enrolled in the present study. With implementation of dynamic adaptive strategy, the overall QTS decreased dramatically (1.76±0.84 vs. 4.91±1.15, t=4.85, P=0.005). The impact was consistent irrespective of trainers' experience (high experience trainers: 0.85±0.40 vs. 2.12±0.44, t=4.98, P=0.004; medium experience trainers: 0.85±0.29 vs. 2.06±0.53, t=4.51, P=0.006; and low experience trainers: 0.10±0.16 vs. 0.44±0.22, t=2.62, P=0.047). For resident (including graduate) and undergraduate student teaching, both QTS was lower with dynamic strategy (residents: 0.18±0.34 vs. 0.97±0.14, t=4.35, P=0.007; undergraduate students 1.57±0.55 vs. 3.77±1.24, t=3.62, P=0.015), but dynamic strategy was effective for post-doc student subgroup and reached comparable QTS as traditional model (0.00±0.00 vs. 0.17±0.41, t=1.00, P=0.363). Conclusions Dynamic adaptive teaching strategy could be a useful alternative to traditional teaching model for post-doc students. It could be a novel effective solution for saving teaching resources and providing individualized surgical teaching modality.

Breast cancer has become the most prevalent malignant tumor worldwide. Screening improves the rate of early detection and is important for the treatment and prognosis of breast cancer. Breast ultrasound is a common method for screening breast cancer, which can be used as a complementary screening tool to mammography to improve the rate of detection, or used for screening breast cancer alone. In recent years, the use of new techniques of ultrasound in screening breast cancer such as shear wave elastography and contrast-enhanced ultrasound, are rapidly developing. This article reviewed the research progress of clinical application of breast ultrasound in screening breast cancer.