Microbial Growth in Saline Breast Implants and Saline Tissue Expanders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subject of microbial growth within the saline medium of prosthetic breast implants has been one of great controversy in recent years. Although several articles have described microbial growth within the tissue surrounding implanted breast prostheses, few have attempted to determine the possibility of such contamination of the luminal saline. The authors studied the intraluminal saline medium of a series of explanted breast prostheses with the objective of identifying any microbial contamination. Over a 6-month period, a consecutive series of saline-filled breast implants and tissue expanders were removed from 37 patients. Under the supervision of a microbiologist, saline extracted from each implant was subjected to bacterial and fungal cultures, Gram staining, and acid-fast staining. A total of 24 saline-filled breast implants were removed from 15 patients, and 32 saline-filled tissue expanders were removed from 22 patients. The average length of implantation was 28.1 months for the implants and 7.1 months for the expanders. None of the saline within the implants or expanders within our series displayed any evidence of microbial contamination. These results suggest that microbial contamination of the luminal saline of prosthetic breast implants is an extremely unlikely event.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".