Calibration and electrical safety status of therapeutic ultrasound used by chiropractic physicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Ultrasound therapy is a commonly used therapeutic modality within the chiropractic profession. Previous calibration studies of ultrasound units within the physical therapy communities in Scotland and Canada have shown that approximately two thirds of units tested did not conform to minimum calibration standards. Similar failure rates may exist in the chiropractic profession and need to be addressed. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether ultrasound machines used by chiropractic physicians met established calibration and electrical safety standards, and to assess frequency of ultrasound therapy use. DESIGN: This cross-sectional study tested 45 ultrasound units for ultrasonic output and electrical safety. Additionally, we asked the doctors to complete a short survey relating to education, usage, and maintenance of their ultrasound equipment. RESULTS: Of the 45 machines tested, 44% failed either calibration or electrical safety inspection. Failure rate was age dependent (P < or =.05). Only 2 of the 45 machines tested had been safety checked within the last year. CONCLUSIONS: A large percentage of ultrasound machines in chiropractic physicians' offices deliver too much or too little dosage to the patient. Electrical safety inspections also revealed a significant failure rate. Chiropractic physicians must become more aware of the requirement for yearly calibration and safety inspections, and understand that failure to maintain their equipment could result in loss of therapeutic effectiveness and pose a threat to the safety of their patients and staff.
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 | 0.003 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".