Opinions of professors, dental students, and patients for publishing the patient images in the articles

Rowshani and Hashemipour BMC Oral Health https://doi.org/10.1186/s12903-023-03792-4 (2024) 24:8 BMC Oral Health Open Access RESEARCH Opinions of professors, dental students, and patients for publishing the patient images in the articles Ava Rowshani1 and Maryam Alsadat Hashemipour1,2* Abstract Introduction The journals must have an instruction for writers to observe the essential ethical principles like privacypreserving, secrecy, and keeping the patients’ identities hidden. Even though patient secrecy is an important ideology in medicine’s ethics, most journals have a little guide on this topic for the authors. According to the absence of such studies in dentistry and limited studies in medicine, our goal in this article is to review the opinions of professors, Kerman dentistry students, and patients for publishing the patient images in the articles. Method This research is an analytical, sectional, and descriptive study. The studied society includes the professors of the dentistry faculty (54 people), the 4th to 6th years dentistry students (122 people), and 129 patients who referred to the offices, the faculty, and other clinics in Kerman city base on simple random sampling method. A query including the personal questions, and questions related to the participants’ opinions about publishing the images was given to contributors. Abundance, average tables, chi-square (χ 2) test, T-test, and SPSS 21 software were used for data description. Results The contributors’ attitudes were different in three groups of participants: more than half of the patients (58.91%), 39.5% of students, and 31.38% of professors believed that no permission is needed. While, 64.34% of the patients, 89.34% of students, and 83.3% of professors believed that written permission is needed for publishing. Conclusion From the participants’ viewpoints, more strict forms are needed by increasing identity recognizability. The professors are more eager than the patients to receive patients’ permission for any kind of image. By reducing the level of identification, doctors and students are more eager than patients to receive approvals. Keywords Patient, Image, Dental student, Journal, Personal data *Correspondence: Maryam Alsadat Hashemipour 1 Social Determinants on Oral Health Research Center, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran 2 Oral and Dental Diseases Research Center, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Rowshani and Hashemipour BMC Oral Health (2024) 24:8 Introduction The journals that publish clinical studies or case reports may contain images of patients that sometimes cause the patient to be identified by others. Twenty years ago, science journals were only available in academic libraries, but nowadays, almost every literary journal is generally online, and many researchers and readers use open access. Unfortunately, open access will allow anybody to use a picture without permission. Although clinical doctors and patients increasingly use the internet to search for medical information, whether they know that reusing a clinical picture is not legal is unclear [1–3]. Although patients have high confidence in doctors, specialists are obligated to provide the best information to the patients, allowing them to choose wisely. This matter applies to choosing the treatment and participating in researching and publishing images of individuals in journals. Also, journals must have clear policies and guidance for authors in observance of ethical standards such as keeping privacy, being anonymous, and confidentiality of patients. Although patience and confidentiality are essential, many journals give little guidance to the authors in this matter or no direction at all [2, 3]. In many cases, there is no guidance in this matter [4, 5]. Research has shown that medical images of patients are a vital part of the patient’s medical reports and must be regarded with reliability considerations and individual privacy [6–8]. It is not always possible to deidentify patients’ images; therefore, they must not be published in journals without the patient’s Informed Consent [9–14]. Medical images’ primary usage (application) relates to patients’ diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. In contrast, their usage for educational and research purposes is considered a second priority [7, 8]. Therefore, knowledgeable consent is an essential part of the research procedure and needs to be more than a signature and patients’ informed consent must be taken freely and without force and based on a clear understanding of the participants [15]. In some countries, for example, Britain and USA, there are federal and professional instructions for publishing images in academic resources and social networks [16– 21]. Due to recent legalization in the EU, medical images and other personal data must be deidentified as quickly as possible for medical research purposes; this process means that without additional separate information, personal data cannot be related to an individual [12]. It is emphasized that individuals must be aware that after publishing images on the general platform, it is impossible to control further usage of the pictures. If consent is determined for a specific use, it cannot be generalized for other purposes. Some journals have policies that in addition to the permission of participate in research; separated patient consent is needed for publishing medical images [22]. Page 2 of 9 Also, the face de-identifying image techniques are not standardized yet. X-rays or small partial images of the face or mouth have less potential for identification than cases with full face images. A traditional way to keep anonymity in the image of a patient’s face is the putting a black ribbon on the patient’s eye [4]. In some situations, identification is not possible; in these circumstances, the patient must be explained entirely to give (...truncated)