Medical Students’ Views on Medical Ethics Education-A Mixed Method Study

Background: Medical Ethics (ME) is considered an integral component of medical education around the world. However, limited training is being offered to medical students in Pakistan. Objectives: This study was designed to evaluate medical students' perspectives regarding medical ethics and to explore their experiences about medical ethics as a subject at a private medical college in Lahore, where Medical Ethics was formally introduced as part of the undergraduate curriculum in 2017. Methods: This mixed-method study included medical students from all five years of medical college. Quantitative component included a survey questionnaire, and the sample size was 410.  Convenient sampling technique was used. Qualitative component included focus group discussions. The students who have attended medical ethics lectures were included in the study. Results: The response rate was 82.72%. There were more females in gender distribution; 76.1% were female and 23.9% were male. Most respondents (74.9%) found medical ethics classes interesting and 72% thought that lecture sessions were important in medical ethics. Conclusions: Medical students find medical ethics as an important component of medical education. Although it is hard to correlate ethics education with their clinical experience as medical students, they believe that medical ethics education can be useful. Social and cultural issues inform clinical decision-making in Pakistan and hence these discussions should be incorporated into medical education. Further studies must be conducted on the actions that need to be taken to help students internalize the ethical issues.

Salibase: A Database of Simulated Alignments

Simulated alignments are an alternative of benchmark alignments used to comparing the Multiple Sequence Alignments tools. The true evolutionary history of simulated sequence is most important motivation which is very valuable to generate accurate phylogenetic trees and alignments. Simulated alignments are also used to validate and investigate accuracy of multiple sequence alignments methods. The researcher can generate simulated alignments including varying sequence length, indel size, insertion rate, deletion rate and number of sequences. User may have to reconstruct the large number of simulated alignments using simulated tools which is very cumbersome and time consuming job. It is also required professional training and expertise for generation of such a big data. Currently there is no databank available which may help the researcher to download simulated alignments for their study. Major focus of our study is to develop database of simulated alignments (SAliBASE) with varying parameters including varying insertion rate, varying deletion rate, varying sequence length, varying number of sequences and varying number of indel size. For generation of sequence/alignments specifically we generate a collection of trees and use each as a guided tree in the alignments algorithm. For such big data analysis we will use R software that contains various types of packages (ape, base, boot, class, treesim etc.). We use package Treesim for the generating of phylogenetic Tree. Phylogenetic trees are used to describe the relationship among species and genes. Five types of parameters trees we generated using R in Newick format, which is the standard input tree format for simulated tools. We proposed indel-seq-gen simulated tool for generation of simulated alignments and sequences. As a part of this study comparative study of simulated alignments tools will also be conducted.