Decision Making in the Surgical Treatment of Cervical Spine Metastases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Qualitative systematic review of the literature. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether surgical indications and techniques are influenced by the region of the cervical spine (occipitocervical, midcervical, and cervicothoracic junctions). SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: There are distinct differences in the anatomic as well as biomechanical characteristics at the occipitocervical junction (C0-C2), subaxial spine (C3-C6), and the cervicothoracic junction (C7-T2), and there is no information on whether these differences influence the decision to intervene surgically or influence the choice of surgical approach. METHODS: A systematic review was designed to answer 2 primary research questions that were determined through consensus among a panel of experts drawn from the Spine Oncology Study Group: 1. Is the decision to operate influenced by the anatomic region of the cervical spine? 2. Is the operative approach influenced by the anatomic region of the cervical spine? RESULTS: For C0-C2 disease, posterior approaches are favored in the majority of cases. In the subaxial cervical spine (C3-C6), anterior approaches were preferred in the majority of cases. A combined anterior/posterior approach was favored for multilevel disease, circumferential tumor involvement, and poor bone quality. At the cervicothoracic junction (C7-T1), anterior or posterior approach was used for decompression. Three column reconstruction from a single posterior approach was an increasingly commonly performed procedure. CONCLUSION: Although there are no level-1 studies to guide decision-making in this area, a literature review does provide some general guidelines for clinical management. Metastatic involvement of junctional regions of the cervical spine (Occ-C2 and C7-T1) and/or kyphosis and collapse involving any region of the cervical spine are key determinants influencing the decision to stabilize the spine.Posterior techniques are favored at the occipitocervical junction, anterior techniques are generally recommended to in the subaxial cervical spine, and either anterior or posterior approaches can be used at the cervicothoracic junction.
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 | 0.061 | 0.173 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".