A Physician Survey Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Decision-Making in Diagnosing and Managing Acute Abdomen in Situs Inversus Totalis (SIT)

Background and purpose: Situs Inversus Totalis (SIT) is a rare congenital visceral mirror transposition deformity. When SIT patients experience acute abdomen, their atypical symptoms and signs can easily lead to cognitive biases (such as anchoring bias) in clinical doctors, resulting in misdiagnosis and incorrect surgical decisions. To systematically assess the universality of this issue, explore its underlying cognitive mechanisms, and ultimately develop response strategies, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of senior surgical and emergency department doctors in China. Data content and methods: This dataset is sourced from a web-based anonymous questionnaire survey. The survey targets practicing surgeons and emergency department doctors from multiple tertiary hospitals in China. The core of the questionnaire is a clinical scenario designed based on a real case (a case of undiagnosed SIT combined with sigmoid colon obstruction perforation), which intentionally conceals key information about the patient's SIT. The dataset contains the following structured fields: ·Basic information of participants: department, clinical work experience, and average annual number of cases of acute abdomen treated. ·Clinical decision data: preliminary diagnosis of simulated cases, preferred surgical incision location, preferred imaging examination method. ·Reflective opinion: After being informed of the correct answer, participants choose measures to prevent such misdiagnosis. The data was collected through the "Wenjuanxing" platform and thoroughly anonymized after export, ensuring the privacy of participants. The value and potential reuse of data: This dataset intuitively reveals the high prevalence of cognitive bias even among experienced clinical doctors when faced with rare anatomical variations. These data are of significant value for the following research areas: 1. Medical education and clinical decision-making: can be used to study how to improve clinical thinking training and enhance awareness of anatomical variations. 2. Patient safety and medical quality: Provides empirical evidence for analyzing the root causes of diagnostic errors and developing prevention strategies. 3. Cognitive psychology: It is a valuable case study on how cognitive preferences such as anchoring bias and availability elicitation work in complex medical contexts. 4. Surgery and Emergency Medicine: directly supported the development and validation of the "SIT-US" cognitive aid tool proposed in this association study.