Nice to see a good RCT that actually addresses an issue that I care about. The image is CC by Araí Moleri Riva-Zucchelli,

I finally found something exciting to write about, the suture button/tightrope. I must admit that I’ve been “suture button curious” for a while now and seeing Andersen et al’s exciting RCT with almost 100 patients was truly interesting. The suture button outperformed the 4-cortical syndesmotic screws in all measurements, both patient reported and radiographic. The study is simply almost too good to be true. Continue reading →

Large multi-center RCTs are worth celebrating with fireworks. The image is CC by Colin Knowles.

The Brits have done it again: an amazing, multi-center study on ankle surgery. They looked at 620 unstable ankle fractures and compared close contact casting (CCC) with surgery. Like so many orthopaedic interventions it seems that both methods are equivalent regarding patient reported outcome although 15% had malunion vs 3% in in the surgical group. Likewise there was a higher non-union in the CCC group, 10% vs 3%. Furthermore about 1 in 5 in the CCC group required later surgery. Continue reading →

Working with multiple outcomes per input can be challenging. The image is cc by Markus Lütkemeyer.

A common situation is that you have an image that can represent more than one class, e.g. a image may both have an oil tanker and an oil platform. You also may have missing data for some of these that you don’t want to evaluate. In my research this problem occurs and my solution so far has been a my own [criterion_ignore](https://github.com/gforge/criterion_ignore) that sets the errors for ignore labels to zero. This post will be a quick look at how to combine the torch-dataframe with the criterion_ignore. Continue reading →

Water-ducks on land. Image is CC by GrooverFW.

I recently e-mailed Freakonomics asking them to look into the economic incentives that govern health-care. Guess if I was thrilled when I found these two recent gems (although I can’t take any credit):

• How Do We Know What Really Works in Healthcare?
• How Many Doctors Does It Take to Start a Healthcare Revolution?

Freakonomics delivers as always with a fresh, interesting scientific perspective. As a supporter since a few years I want to recommend these to anyone interested in the topic. As I have written earlier, I find it perplexing that so many arthroscopies are being performed while so much evidence is pointing against this. There is probably a vast combination of incentives that result in this, these podcasts provide some nice insights.

Compartment syndrome is a feared complication that can be both limb- and life-threatening. The image is CC by jαγ Δ.

Compartment syndrome occurs most commonly after trauma to the lower leg. It causes excruciating pain and may result in muscle death and in some sever cases even death. Detecting these is therefore of uttermost importance and McQueen et al’s recent study on the subject is very welcome. They show that continuous intracompartmental pressure measurement in a clinical setting is feasible and has a high sensitivity and specificity. Continue reading →