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.