A SURVEY TO DETERMINE THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONCEPTUAL BASIS AND DIAGNOSTIC TESTS USED FOR BRAIN DEATH BY NEUROSURGEONS IN CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the understanding of the conceptual basis and diagnostic tests used for brain death (BD) by neurosurgeons in Canada. METHODS: Between February and June 2006, a previously developed survey was mailed to every neurosurgeon in Canada. RESULTS: Of 223 surveys mailed, 147 (66%) were returned; of these, 128 (87%) were completed and analyzed. When asked to choose a conceptual reason to explain why BD is equivalent to death, 50 (39%) chose a higher brain concept, 50 (39%) chose a prognosis concept, and 33 (26%) chose a loss of integration of the organism concept. More than half of respondents answered that BD is not compatible with electroencephalographic activity or brainstem evoked potential activity. More than one-third of respondents answered that some cerebral blood flow or a brainstem with minimal microscopic damage was not compatible with BD. Of the 90 respondents who answered that they were comfortable diagnosing BD because the conceptual basis of BD makes it equivalent to death of the patient, in their own words, 14 (16%) used a loss of integration concept, 20 (22%) used a prognosis concept, 25 (28%) used a higher brain concept, and 39 (43%) did not articulate a concept. When asked, "Are brain death and cardiac death the same state (i.e., are both death of the patient)?," 57 (45%) answered "No." CONCLUSION: Within the neurosurgical community, a stand-alone concept of BD does not exist. There is also significant variability in the understanding of the tests that are compatible with the criterion of BD.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".