Consent to External-Beam Radiotherapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian law, and the physician's code of ethics, requires that informed consent be obtained before any medical act is performed. However, there are no rules about how consent is to be obtained and by whom, and how that consent is to be documented.In April 2008, we asked the heads of all Canadian radiation oncology departments to tell us whether their centre uses a written consent form for external-beam radiotherapy and, if it did, to send us a copy of the form or forms used. Responses were received from 29 of the 38 centres contacted (76%). In 12 centres, all of them in British Columbia or Quebec, no written consent is obtained. Of the 17 centres (59%) that do seek written consent, 9 use a generic hospital or cancer centre form. Only 5 use a form specific to radiotherapy that mentions multiple visits, photographs in the treatment position, use of tattoos, and so on, and only 2 use a form that is specific to the tumour type or site irradiated and that explains the risks associated with treatment. The final centre of the 17 did not provide a form for review.While current practice at the McGill University Health Centre is not out of line with that at other Canadian centres, the results of our survey suggest a need for dialogue on the subject of consent for external-beam radiotherapy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.024 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.022 |
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".