Paper #92 Functional bracing vs surgical repair for the treatment of Achilles tendon ruptures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To compare clinical and functional performance measures in patients having undergone either surgical repair or functional bracing for complete rupture of the Achilles tendon. A prospective sample of 12 patients with a rupture of the Achilles tendon were managed non-operatively with a functional bracing protocol at one centre (University of Rochester Medical Centre) and a group of age, gender, time since injury, and activity-matched controls with the same injury were managed with a standardized surgical repair at another centre (University of Western Ontario). Both groups followed similar immobilization and rehabilitation protocols. Outcomes included subjective responses to a questionnaire, clinical measurements of the range of motion of the ankle, and ground-reaction forces and temporal data gathered during functional dynamic activities that included walking, a single-limb power hop, and a single-limb heel rise endurance test. Subjects were similar in both groups with respect to gender (11M, 1F), age (surgical = 39.9 yrs, bracing = 40.3 yrs), and time since injury (surgical = 3.3 yrs, bracing = 2.7 yrs). Subjective assessment of the treatment was rated as excellent (surgery = 9, bracing = 9), good (surgical = 2, bracing = 3), and fair (surgical = 1). Passive ankle plantar flexion was found to be decreased in both groups in comparison to the contralateral leg (surgical = 4.9o, bracing = 1.7o). Passive ankle dorsiflexion was decreased in comparison to the contralateral leg by 4.6o in the surgical group and increased by 2.0o in the bracing group. This difference was found to be statistically significant (p = 0.02). With the numbers available, we could detect no significant differences between the groups with regard to any of the kinetic or temporal variables that were measured during functional dynamic activities. With the numbers available, surgical repair of the Achilles tendon demonstrates no difference in clinical or functional outcome compared to functional bracing with the exception of an increase in passive dorsiflexion in the non-operative group.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".