Measure of Knowledge in Students at Uniandes, Ecuador, on the Manifestations of Oral Cancer

Abstract

Oral cancer is a disease that deserves as much attention as possible from specialists. It is vitally important that specialists know the manifestations of this disease and they must be able to early detect it. That is why we carried out a survey on the students and teachers of the Uniandes Dental Care Unit to assess the knowledge they have about this illness. Likert scale was chosen to perform the measurement because of the subjective nature of the opinions. However, more accuracy is necessary to assess the responses. Therefore, we used the indeterminate Likert scale, based on Triple Refined Indeterminate Neutrosophic Sets, for each of the responses, which allowed us taking into account contradictory opinions. It consists of five elements: “Negative membership”, “Indeterminacy leaning towards negative membership”, “Indeterminate membership”, “Indeterminacy leaning towards positive membership”, and “Positive membership”. To measure the result, an indeterminate minimum spanning tree (MST) clustering algorithm is used. The importance of this study lies in the fact that is the first one of this kind carried out in the country, which may be a starting point for other researches on this topic in the national territory.

Keywords

• triple refined indeterminate neutrosophic set
• indeterminate likert scale
• indeterminate minimum spanning tree clustering algorithm
• survey
• oral cancer