Authors' reply: Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials comparing open and laparoscopic ventral and incisional hernia repair with mesh (<i>Br J Surg</i> 2009; 96: 851–858)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sir We would like to thank the reader for the comments regarding our paper and appreciate the opportunity to respond. It is reasonable to assume that repair of umbilical and spigelian hernias is technically easier and may well have better outcomes than the repair of incisional hernias. Unfortunately, in the trials analysed for this meta-analysis, those studies that included patients with both incisional and ventral (umbilical, spigelian) hernias did not report the results separately, thus preventing stratification of the results for meta-analysis. It is likely that if stratification by type of defect were possible, the small sample sizes within each strata would not allow a significant difference to be detected, if present. Multivariable analysis would allow the confounding effects of variables such as defect size to be adjusted for, but is not possible without patient-level data. Such data were not sought for this study. With respect to the size of the hernia, as the mean size of the hernias in this study were typically less than 140 cm2 in area, the results cannot be generalized to patients with larger defects.
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 | 0.031 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".