Team:CLSB-UK/HP/Silver/Survey Responses
Contents
Human Practices: Doctor Survey Responses
This is a detailed breakdown of the questions we asked and the raw results. Analysis and conclusions are back on the silver human practices page.
Sampling
We surveyed 16 doctors from a range of medical specialties to gauge opinions on the viability of our miRNA diagnostic system. The respondents were not chosen randomly or systematically, as the total pool from which samples could be taken was not large enough to warrant either approach; rather, we used a form of stratified sampling to select primarily higher-qualified doctors, preferably with oncology experience to make the results of our survey as valid as possible.
Questions
Each question asked had specific aims:
- State your medical specialty/grade
- to ascertain which fields and positions the doctors’ opinions came from or were representative of.
- Do you know of any diagnostic pathways for cancers that have a low 5-year survival rate? If yes, please state one cancer you know about. How easy is it to detect this cancer in the early stages?
- to compare our system to other existing diagnostic pathways and find out which other cancers could be applicable to miRNA detection. Symptoms of many cancers don’t appear until they are at an advanced stage - thus finding out the opinions of doctors about the difficulty of early-stage diagnosis was important to see whether our system could make this easier.
- Which are the principle challenges to making a robust diagnosis of this cancer? (multiple choice)
- to see other ways we could leverage synthetic biology to make improvements over other diagnostics tools - clearly the more problems our system solves, the better it is.
- How important do you think it is to develop new diagnostic methods to overcome the current problems in diagnosing this cancer?
- to select cancers that our sensor would be a significant improvement for over current methods
- To what extent do you agree with the statement that "early diagnosis is crucial to successful treatment/cure of this cancer"?
- miRNA screening could detect cancers before they have symptoms, so we wanted to determine the importance of early diagnosis for the cancer provided
- How familiar are you with the use of synthetic genetic circuits in the diagnosis of cancer? If you are familiar with these techniques, how effective do you think they are? Do you believe that tests on body fluids (so-called 'liquid biopsies') could be more cost-effective than currently existing tests for making a diagnosis of this cancer?
- These three questions were asked to determine how effective our system was in the eyes of healthcare professionals, and to gauge their opions towards synthetic genetic circuits.
- How easy was it to complete this questionnaire? Do you have any suggestions for how we might improve this questionnaire?
- to improve our own survey-taking skills for future questionnaires.
Results
We received results from 16 different doctors in various medical specialties - including 2 oncologists and 2 respiratory consultants.
All doctors surveyed knew of cancers with low 5-year survival rates, with the most common cancers they knew about being lung (4), pancreatic (4) and oesophageal (4). Head and neck cancer, cervical cancer, squamous cell carcinoma and Barrett’s oesophagus (a condition affecting squamous cells lining the oesophagus - a common precursor to oesophageal cancer) were also identified.
The majority of doctors (11) gave their cancer an ease-of-detection rating of 2/6, with 1 being ‘impossible’ and 6 being ‘extremely straightforward’. No doctors gave their cancer a rating of above 4/6.
The principle challenges of making a robust diagnosis of the cancers were varied. The most common challenges identified were late presentation of symptoms (11), invasiveness (9) and equivocal/indeterminate test results (7). Cost (5), timeframe (5) and patient co-morbities (4) were also fairly common.
Half the doctors deemed it ‘very important’ (6/6) to develop new diagnostic methods of cancer.. Nobody gave a answer of below 3/6 to this question, and similarly over 70% of doctors (11) ‘strongly agreed’ that early diagnosis is crucial to the successful treatment of cancer, with again nobody giving a answer of below 3/6.
12 of the doctors had no or very little familiarity with the use of genetic circuits to diagnose cancer (<=2/6). Nobody surveyed was ‘very familiar’ using genetic circuits as a diagnostic tool for cancer. Of those that were familiar, 1 considered it ‘very effective’ (6/6), 3 answered 4/6 and 2 answered 3/6, with nobody deeming them ‘not effective’.
60% of doctors (9) agreed or strongly agreed that liquid biopsies could be more cost-effective than current tests to diagnose cancer, and again nobody gave a score below 3/6
All but one doctor thought the survey was easy to complete, with one doctor suggesting widening the range of choice from 1 to 6 to 1 to 10 would give respondents greater flexibility. Also in hindsight we should have provided an open text field for any other feedback about our project or to talk about cancer diagnoses.
Analysis and conclusion
Analysis and conclusions are available on the silver human practices page.
