Evaluation of the 11th rib extrapleural—retroperitoneal approach to the thoracolumbar junction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECT: The 11th rib extrapleural-retroperitoneal approach offers an alternative means for access to the thoracolumbar junction. It provides excellent operative exposure without the need to transgress the diaphragm, resulting in less morbidity and reduced risk of pulmonary complications. This approach, however, has been dismissed by many surgeons offering the unsubstantiated criticism that it affords limited access. Thus far, only technical descriptions of the operative procedure are available in the literature, without documentation of the clinical outcomes of these patients. In the current study the authors describe the 11th rib extrapleural-retroperitoneal approach to the thoracolumbar junction, and they evaluate the associated early and late morbidity in these patients. METHODS: From September 1996 to August 1999, the authors collected prospective data of consecutive patients who underwent surgery for a variety of pathological conditions of the thoracolumbar junction via this approach. In 26 consecutive patients requiring an anterior spinal procedure, lesions located between T-10 and T-11 were studied and followed for a mean period of 17 months (range 1-36 months). There were 13 men and 13 women whose mean age was 47 years (range 16-80 years), with the following pathological entities: trauma (13 cases), neoplasm (six cases), infection (two cases), and deformity (five cases). There were no cases of neurological deterioration. There were no significant pulmonary complications, and only one patient required insertion of a postoperative chest tube. CONCLUSIONS: The 11th rib extrapleural-retroperitoneal approach was successfully used to treat patients with a variety of lesions in the thoracolumbar junction and was associated with little morbidity. The authors believe that previous criticism suggesting that this approach provides only limited access is unsubstantiated.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".