Factors Affecting the Use of Palliative Radiotherapy in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To describe the use of palliative radiotherapy (PRT) and to identify factors associated with the use of PRT. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Ontario Cancer Registry was used to identify 193,253 adult patients who died of cancer between 1986 and 1995. Radiotherapy records from all Ontario cancer centers and the data on socioeconomic status (SES) from the Canadian Census were linked to the Ontario Cancer Registry data. The proportion of cases who received at least one course of PRT at any time within 2 years of death (PRT(2Y)) was used as a primary measure of the use rate of PRT. RESULTS: Overall, 26.4% of cases underwent at least one course of PRT. PRT(2Y) remained relatively constant over the study period. PRT(2Y) was disease-specific and ranged from 4% for pancreatic cancer to 41% for prostate cancer. Age was negatively associated with PRT(2Y) (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 4.5 for the youngest group), and SES was positively associated with PRT(2Y) (adjusted OR, 1.2 for patients from wealthy communities). Patients who were initially diagnosed in a hospital affiliated with a cancer center (adjusted OR, 1.4) or who lived in a county in which a cancer center is located (adjusted OR, 1.2), or who resided in certain regions (adjusted OR, 1.20 for Hamilton and 1.17 for Kingston), were more likely to be treated with PRT. CONCLUSION: The use of PRT varied across the dispersed population in Ontario and was influenced by factors unrelated to the patient's needs. An effort should be made to reduce barriers to access for disadvantaged groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".