Objective: As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies advance rapidly, their integration into healthcare is transforming the clinical practice landscape. This study aimed to evaluate how second-year medical students perceive their professional mission in an AI-integrated medical future, through a structured essay task, using text-mining analysis to identify emerging themes and attitudes.Methods: A total of 105 second-year medical students at Kagawa university in Japan completed an essay titled “What is your mission in the AI-driven medical world?”. Responses were analyzed using KH Coder for frequency analysis, multidimensional scaling, and co-occurrence network mapping. Participants provided verbal informed consent and student anonymity was ensured.Results: The most frequently used terms were medical, consider, think, doctor, AI, human, and patient. Three thematic clusters emerged: (1) career design, (2) AI and medicine, and (3) AI and human. Co-occurrence analysis revealed strong associations between “medical” and both “consider” and “patient”, while “patient” was linked to both “AI” and “human”, indicating thoughtful reflection on technology’s impact on patient care.Conclusion: Second-year medical students in Japan demonstrated critical engagement with the concept of mission formation in the context of AI in healthcare. Their essays reflected a balance between optimism for technological advancement and concern for preserving human-centered care. These findings highlight the importance of implementing systematic career education and future-oriented thinking that is aligned with the characteristics of Generation Z learners.

Purpose: Few surveys have demonstrated that medical students’ understanding of palliative care in Japan. This study’s aim is to examine whether medical students prior to beginning clinical clerkship are ready to learn palliative care. Methods: Prior to the commencement of participatory clinical training, approval was obtained from the Kagawa University Faculty of Medicine Research Ethics Committee for the execution of this study. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 105 students enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at our university, focusing on their confidence in achieving the learning objectives for “Palliative Care” outlined in the Medical Education Model Core Curriculum. Participants rated the confidence to the nine learning objectives related to palliative care (ranging from 0 points indicating no confidence to 100 points indicating full confidence). A comparison of the nine items was conducted using the Kruskal–Wallis test, followed by Scheffe’s multiple comparison test. A significance level of P<0.05 was applied. Results: The response rate was 62.9% (66 out of 105 students). Confidence in achieving the learning objectives varied, with item 6, “Understanding the concept and definition of death and the biology of organismal death,” being significantly higher than the other five items (P<0.05). No significant differences were observed among the other items. Conclusion: The need for systematic preparatory education on palliative care for medical students who are about to enter clinical practice is suggested.

Objective: This study compared the regional-quota and general-selected medical students’ understanding, interest, and confidence in the community medicine practice and their attitudes toward the concept guidelines.Methods: We conducted a Web-based questionnaire survey regarding the understanding, interest, and confidence in future community medicine practice and attitudes toward concept guidelines among medical students of all grades (regional-quota and general-selected: n=82 and n=617, respectively).Results: The overall response rates were 68.5% (56/82) and 66.0% (409/617) in the regional-quota and general-selected groups, respectively. Although there was no significant difference between the groups in terms of understanding (P=0.998), interest and confidence in future practice were significantly higher in the regional-quota group (both P<0.001). There was no significant difference between the two groups for any of the six questions regarding community medicine guidelines.Conclusion: The understanding of community medicine or its conceptual guidelines did not significantly differ between the two groups; however, interest and confidence in future practice were significantly higher in the regional-quota group. These results suggest that the regional-quota system positively upregulates the interest in community medicine, which could be associated with confidence in future practice. Comprehensive and longitudinal improvements in the regional-quota system may be effective in cultivating community medicine.